Playwriting Quotes:

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

- Tony Kushner

topic: Fundamentals, Kind, Playwriting, Irresponsibility

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

source: Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

topic: Art, Expecting, Playwriting

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

topic: Blood, Theatre, Producers, Playwriting

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

topic: Character, Play, Two, Playwriting

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

topic: Believe, Writing, Class, Playwriting

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

topic: Character, Long, Perfect, Playwriting

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

topic: Thinking, Judging, Empathy, Playwriting

In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can.

- David Mamet

topic: Mistake, Writing, Thinking, Pastry Chef, Playwriting

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

topic: Teacher, Lucky, Actors, Playwriting

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

- Edward Albee

topic: Stage, Hanging Out, Guts, Playwriting

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

- Edward Albee

topic: Writing, Play, Differences, Playwriting

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

topic: Play, Grew, Difficult, Playwriting

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

topic: Movie Love, Painful, Theater, Playwriting

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

- Paula Vogel

topic: Theatre, Calling, Process, Playwriting, Hazing

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

topic: Writing, Light, Play, Playwriting

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

topic: Writing, Play, Long, Playwriting

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

- Moliere

topic: Love, Money, Sex, Writing By Writers, Copywriting

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

topic: Creativity, Thinking, Details, Playwriting

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

source: Source: blogs.indiewire.com

topic: Real, Moving, Character, Playwriting, Distinctive

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

topic: Mother, College, Class, College Degree, Playwriting

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

source: "The Essential Noël Coward Compendium: The Very Best of His Work, Life and Times".

topic: Thinking, Years, Play, Hull, Playwriting

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

topic: Writing, Artist, Theatre, Playwriting

The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.

- Alden Nowlan

topic: Forgiveness, Wise, Wisdom, Live And Learn, Becoming An Adult

Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.

- Moss Hart

topic: India, Theater, Humbling, Playwriting

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

source: Edward Gordon Craig (2008). “On the Art of the Theatre”, p.25, Routledge

topic: Art, Believe, Play, Playwriting

Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting.

- Jez Butterworth

source: "The grass is greener" by Mark Lawson, www.theguardian.com. March 23, 2009.

topic: Sitting, Should, Pubs, Playwriting

What was once a cottage industry dedicated to the discovery and development of new voices and works has become instead the raison d'etre for many a playwright's existence . . .. And since readings have become playwrights' main source of exposure, the nature of playwriting has changed to fit readings' needs. Investigation into what is eminently theatrical has been substituted - more and more these days - by what can simply come across and read well.

- Caridad Svich

topic: Reading, Discovery, Voice, Raison D'etre, Playwriting

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

topic: People, Theatre, Stories, Playwriting

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

source: Source: www.guernicamag.com

topic: Thinking, Two, Musical, Playwriting, Musical Theater

When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.

- Tony Kushner

source: Source: www.guernicamag.com

topic: Writing, Play, Students, Playwriting

I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.

- Ellen McLaughlin

topic: Writing, Order, Land, Playwriting, Use Of Language

I got the breaks. Starting from nowhere in the corn belt, I helped edit a country weekly, then was jack-of-all-departments on an obscure daily, so that when I arrived in a big city everything I tackled in the line of column conducting and syndicate peddling and playwriting had to bring promotion, because I had no social standing which could be endangered, no reputation to toss away and no pride which might suffer a setback. Everything I acquired had to be velvet. You cannot lose your silver spoon if you are brought up on pewter.

- George Ade

topic: Country, Pride, Cities, Pewter, Peddling

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

topic: Writing, Play, Ideas, Starting To Write, Playwriting

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

topic: Character, Play, Together, Playwriting

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

topic: Smart, Writing, Character, Very Smart, Playwriting

Watching first nights, though I've seen quite a few by now, is never any better. It's a nerve-racking experience. It's not a question of whether the play goes well or badly. It's not the audience reaction, it's my reaction. I'm rather hostile toward audiences—I don't much care for large bodies of people collected together. Everyone knows that audiences vary enormously; it's a mistake to care too much about them. The thing one should be concerned with is whether the performance has expressed what one set out to express in writing the play. It sometimes does.

- Harold Pinter

topic: Mistake, Writing, Night, Playwriting

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

topic: Views, Challenges, Theatre, Playwriting, Take Me Away

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

topic: Book, Home, Successful, Playwriting