Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to. — T. S. Eliot
For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence. — Wallace Shawn
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage. — Edward Albee
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay. — Dirk Benedict
Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus. — Peter Ustinov
A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it. — Edward Albee
A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant. — Wilson Mizner
In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born. — Constantin Stanislavski
God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. — Garrison Keillor
I would not have so many scripts being driven by demographics. The play's the thing - not the 18-35 year old male age group. — Stephen Tobolowsky
The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically. — Timothy West
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is. — Jack Lemmon
Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life. — Bette Davis
Within the various acts of the ecodrama should be included scenes in which men's and women's roles come to center stage and scenes in which Nature 'herself' is an actress. — Carolyn Merchant
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. — Arthur Miller
Playwright Quotes
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it. — Bertolt Brecht
Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself. — Wole Soyinka
When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in. — Sam Shepard
I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget. — Arthur Miller
Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it. — August Strindberg
Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing. — Linda Hogan
If you have a good idea, open your mouth and say something else. — Keith Johnstone
You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you. — Robert Anton Wilson
No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning. — Zbigniew Herbert
It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad. — Thomas Bernhard
I believe in the time when we shall be able to create works of art in the Theatre without the use of the written play, without the use of actors. — Edward Gordon Craig
For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play. — Sam Shepard
I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky. — Orson Scott Card
I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright. — Liev Schreiber
Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard. — Arthur Miller
Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along. — Edward Albee
I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays. — Zoe Kazan
I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies. — Zoe Kazan
Feydeau's one rule of playwriting:
Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B.
Knock Knock.
Enter Character B. — John Guare
My mother was working on her college degree throughout my childhood, and being the youngest in the family, that meant being dragged to a lot of her classes. She majored in playwriting, so I was exposed to theatre from a very young age, and it was just the most magical world to me. — Valorie Curry
Playwriting is all about empathy, getting inside the head of someone who is not you, to think like they think without judging them. — Donald Margulies
Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession. — Moss Hart
Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process. — Paula Vogel
I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I'm always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses, how dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what's funny, how to build distinctive and original characters - all the aspects of playwriting, scene-building, the architecture of dramatizing. — Adriana Trigiani
I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that. — August Wilson
One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel. — Simon McBurney
I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft. — David Ives
Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting. — Jez Butterworth
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents. — Aristotle
It's no use to go and take courses in playwriting any more than it's much use taking courses in acting. Better play to a bad matinée in Hull, it will teach you much more than a year of careful instruction. — Noel Coward
When I was in college at UCLA, I took a playwriting course. I was all set to be a writer. But I had to take this acting class as a theater arts major. I had to do this scene in a one-act comedy. I just said this line, and then... this laugh happened. I thought, 'Whoa. This is a really good feeling. What have I been missing?' — Carol Burnett
The only reason I acted in school was because of the community. I was in the chorus of every play and was never the lead other than one time, but to me it was about the community. I was an English major and my whole goal was to be an English teacher and was lucky enough to get into the playwriting group. The whole experience I had at Brown was eye opening and the most mind-bending experience. — John Krasinski
I have tried to defend what is most precious to our American society, a society that is now at war against the forces of racial intolerance.A big part of me making the decision was how important the play is for the times that we live in. This is a classic. It's a masterpiece of American playwriting. It's about discrimination and it's about we Mexicans being a target for so many years. — Demian Bichir
There are two strains, I think, in American playwriting, of importance. One is traditional narrative realism, which is definitely my strain, and then the other great contribution is American musical theater, which is a whole other kettle of fish. — Tony Kushner
When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it. — Wallace Shawn
I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for. — Tennessee Williams
Brooke Berman's voice is utterly distinct, and her book, detailing her nomadic artist's journey toward both a successful playwriting career and a home of her own, through 20 years of cramped sublets, high-rise palaces, writer's colonies, and boyfriend's vans, is a hilarious, hopeful, and penetrating must-read. — Maria Dahvana Headley
I've come to view screenwriting assignments as playwriting grants, because they provide a considerable financial cushion. However, they can also be extremely time-consuming. Film projects tend to drag on and on, which takes me away from the theatre, and then they don't get made. At the same time, the screenplays that have come my way have been quite challenging, for the most part, and even enjoyable. — Donald Margulies
But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don't have to be very smart. — Beth Henley
In Conclusion
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