Tracy Letts Quotes

I don't know what it says about me that I have a greater affinity with the damaged. Probably nothing good.

BARBARA: They're called Native Americans now, Mom.
VIOLET: Who calls them that? Who makes that decision?

I'm aware that a film is different than a play, and that a film isn't going to be the filmed record of the play. It's its own separate entity, and I've come to peace with that.

It's not a natural translation, transition, to take something from stage to screen. Onstage your action is communicated through the spoken word primarily, and on screen it's communicated through pictures. So it's always been kind of unnatural to take something that lives on the stage and turn it into moving pictures.

BILL: Please, sweetheart, we need to know what went on here. JEAN: Nothing "went on." Can we just not make a federal case out of everything?

You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.

I'm sick of the whole notion of the enduring female. GROW UP! 'Cause while you're going through your fifth puberty, the world is falling apart and I can't handle it! (Barbara Weston)

The window shades have all been removed. Nighttime is now free to encroach.

I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'

I don't write plays for them to be turned into movies.

Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age ... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.

If you feel like you're in control of everything, and then things aren't going well, you feel like you're failing.

I don't have a great face for camera.

'Killer Joe' was originally written in 1991 and first produced in '93 at the Next Theater's Lab - a 40 seat black box theater in Evanston, Illinois - back when I was getting started. I was just 25 and I had been acting for awhile, but it was my first play and the one that really got me noticed, especially by Steppenwolf.

My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.

My point is, it's not cut and dried, black and white, good and bad. It lives where everything lives: somewhere in the middle. Where everything lives, where all the rest of us live, everyone but you.

When I write a play, and we read it for the first time, the great fear is that everybody is going to say, 'You're a bum and you can't write. This stinks.' and throw the script in the garbage. The great hope is that they're all going to lift me up on their shoulders and carry me to the streets, singing, 'He's a genius, he's a genius!'

Divorce is an embarrassing public admission of defeat.

I never know what the hell I'm writing about, I never know what the next thing I'm writing about is, I never have a plan.

STEVE: No, we maintain the accounts offshore, just until we get approvals. BILL: To get around approvals? STEVE: To get around approvals until we get approvals. There's a lot of red tape, a lot of bureaucracy. I

MATTIE FAE: I'm still very sexy, thank you very much. VIOLET: You're about as sexy as a wet cardboard box, Mattie Fae, you and me both. Don't kid yourself.

If you're not entertaining, what the hell's the point?

CHARLIE: So you can't even see Ivy's point? MATTIE FAE: No. CHARLIE: That Little Charles and Beverly share some kind of ... complication. MATTIE FAE: Honey, you have to be smart to be complicated. CHARLIE: That's our boy. Are you saying our boy isn't smart? MATTIE FAE: Yes, that's what I'm saying.

Hey. Please. This is not the Midwest. All right? Michigan is the Midwest, God knows why. This is the Plains: a state of mind, right, some spiritual affliction, like the Blues.

She's the Indian who lives in my attic.

Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't
like me right now
people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.

Thank God we can't see the future, we'd never get out of bed.

By night within that ancient house Immense, black, damned, anonymous.

Sometimes my family thinks I've made my childhood a bit more Dickensian than it was, and it probably wasn't all that bad. But I was uncomfortable as a kid.

You're thoughtful, Barbara, but you're not open. You're passionate, but you're hard. You're a good, decent, funny, wonderful woman, and I love you, but you're a pain in the ass.

Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.

I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors.

BARBARA: Even if things don't work out with you and Marsha. BILL: Cindy. BARBARA: Cindy. BILL: Right. Even if things don't work out. BARBARA: And I'm never really going to understand why, am I? (Bill struggles ... it seems as if he might say something more, but then BILL: Probably not. (Silence. Bill heads for the door. Barbara watches him go and sobs.) BARBARA: I love you ... I love you ... (He stands for a moment, his back to her. He exits. Barbara stands, alone.)

You don't work as hard to watch a movie. You work harder to watch a play, so what the audience puts into it is interesting.

BARBARA: You do understand that it hurts, to go from sharing a bed with you for twenty-three years to sleeping by myself. BILL: I'm here, now. BARBARA: Men always say shit like that, as if the past and the future don't exist. BILL: Can we not make this a gender discussion? BARBARA: Do men really believe that here and now is enough? It's just horseshit, to avoid talking about the things they're afraid to say.

IVY: Mom believes women don't grow more attractive with age. KAREN: Oh, I disagree, I - VIOLET: I didn't say they "don't grow more attractive," I said they get ugly. And it's not really a matter of opinion, Karen dear. You've only just started to prove it yourself.

I like Shakespeare, but I never know what the hell is going on.

BILL: I have not forsook my responsibilities!-
BARBARA: It's "forsaken," big shot!
BILL: Actually, "forsook" is also an acceptable usage!-
BARBARA: Oh, "forsook" you and the horse you rose in on!

I like it when actors get an opportunity to chew into something. They love scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends - scenes that give an arc to their characters and allow audiences to get to know these people.

We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more.