Richard Greenberg Quotes

You do think, if you have your druthers, 'I want to sort of be, not anonymous, but unknown'. But you don't have your druthers in life, do you?

When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat.

A play gets on Broadway by fluke. And you don't even start out with that ambition. When I do a play, the intention is just to put it up somewhere.

Public housing has two main functions: to meet a need and to punish the needy for having that need. In addition, it must never inspire resentment among those who get their shelter full price.

The best thinking says 'the self' is a fiction (I have a piece about that), yet it's a fiction that we all believe, our most intimate experience. Maybe it's nothing more than our tendency to repeat. Maybe we repeat because when we do, we recognize the behavior and the familiarity is comforting. So the self is just the consolation of our tendencies.

I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.

The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays.

When you're writing plays, it's possible to believe you don't have any real world skill. When you're adapting, it is really all about the mechanics, so you feel closer to, I don't know, an accountant or someone who has a body of information. It's not all about temperament.

I think I'm a writer, and it's my job. People in other professions are expected to do their jobs all the time. Why shouldn't I?

I came to New York, and it was fascinating and intimidating and yielding, and all the stuff it's supposed to be. But whatever the abstract essence I was seeking, I couldn't find exactly that.

For some reason, 1968 is a touchstone year for me. I think it was the first year I felt fully conscious.

I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, Oh, nobody gets it, that's all. I'll write another draft to make her make sense. It took me awhile to learn that these three people were the core of this play, which seems so obvious now.

See it? Oh, I have no interest in seeing it. Seeing it might get in the way of my opinion.

Frankly, seeing my plays with an audience is something I do with gritted teeth; I find the experience very difficult. I love the moment when you have just the dress rehearsal, when no one's there; that's kind of the peak to me. When people start filing in, I like to file out.

I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.

By the time I started writing plays, Broadway was never an expectation, so it's never been central.

The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!

It seems that the hurdle you have to jump over is everyone's informed opinion. When you're a young playwright, you're probably too precarious in your own technique to understand that when these seemingly informed opinions are contradicting each other, it becomes this paralyzing monolith.

The ocean is interacting with the surface. There is a possible biosphere that extends from way below the surface to just above the crust

It's weird, because I don't feel prolific. I don't write anything for months at a time.

I was formed by 'The Forsyte Saga' marathon. There was something about seeing all those events telescoped that was unbelievably moving: that sense of time as something that can be tinkered with.

I think I can be an intimidating energy in the room. I think I come in with an aura of wanting results because as the playwright, I know how it goes, and there's the thought, 'Why can't they catch up?'

My mother wanted me to be a writer. But she was a child of the Depression and never understood that she wasn't poor. So, you know, the idea of not having a job, it would creep through. But she tried very hard to be subtle about it.