Playwright Quotes
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
Francis Ford Coppola
If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.
Brad Dourif
A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
Wilson Mizner
I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.
Peter Shaffer
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
Alex Cox
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.
Tom Stoppard
The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.
George P. Baker
Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.
Mindy Kaling
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
Francis Ford Coppola
Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.
William Goldman
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
Arthur Miller
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.
Mark Helprin
A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
Terence Rattigan
One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays.
Vivien Leigh
It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
John Lithgow
A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.
Timothy West
I grew up in Manhattan and, since my father was a playwright, all I ever wanted to be was a stage actress.
Laura Linney
A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.
Russell Baker
I pray to be of service to the playwright, the audience, the other actors and my character.
Lusia Strus
I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?
Don DeLillo
Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.
David Ives
The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
Robert Anderson
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