Paula Vogel famous quotes

Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process.
-- Paula Vogel

#Theatre #Calling #Process

Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.
-- Paula Vogel

#Art #Art Is #Subjects

This grant gave me more than memories; it gave me a crucial experience that is formative to all writers: the ability to perceive that we become writers in exile, where what we write is the only link across distance and time…I became a Maryland writer because the community of Juneau took me in.
-- Paula Vogel

#Memories #Distance #Writing

Theater is perhaps one of the few places left where we are in a dialogue right now. Everything has become so partisan, and the rhetoric has become so heated, that conversation is almost impossible.
-- Paula Vogel

#Impossible #Theater #Conversation

My writing isn't actually guided by issues. I know it seems that way, but I don't sit down and think, Oh, there's this issue I'm bothered about. I only write about things that directly impact my life. When I write, there's a pain that I have to reach, and a release I have to work toward for myself. So it's really a question of the particular emotional circumstance that I want to express, a character that appears, a moment in time, and then I write the play backwards.
-- Paula Vogel

#Pain #Writing #Character

I want to seduce the audience. If they can go along for a ride they wouldn't ordinarily take, or don't even know they're taking, then they might see highly charged political issues in a new and unexpected way. . . . The theatre is now so afraid to face its social demons that we've given that responsibility over to film. But it will always be harder to deal with certain issues in the theatre. The live event - being watched by people as we watch - makes it seem all the more dangerous.
-- Paula Vogel

#Responsibility #Issues #People

In art as in life, some things need no translation.
-- Paula Vogel

#Art #Needs #Translations

My own work has been influenced by my years of teaching in that it's very hard for me to be cynical. When you're working with emerging, brilliant talent, you have to believe in the future. It makes me hungry, as a 65-year-old. I'm not thinking about the time that is behind me. I'm thinking of these people that I watch to catch up with and be in their company.
-- Paula Vogel

#Believe #Teaching #Thinking

I was so scared of going back to the theatre after 'Hamlet.' I didn't know if I'd do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it.

Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theatre?

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.

Destiny is saying yes to the calling we were born with.

By living up to their calling, women will succeed in guaranteeing a proper recognition of the unique value of femininity and its crucial mission in the world.

Excellence is a continuous process and not an accident.

I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It's an incredibly nourishing process; it's probably the closest I come to having a religion.

The struggle for morality never stays won. It's always in process.

It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.