Richard Foreman Quotes

From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality
a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) there placement of complex inner density with a new kind of self
evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available.'

I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.

All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.

I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not ... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.

If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit.

Like garden weeds, conflict always seems to find a way of sprouting up,

You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.

I've been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky.

So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.