Playwriting Quotes

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor. ~ Tom Stoppard

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

How many plays have been written in France?' Candide asked the abbe.
'Five or six thousand.'
'That's a lot,' said Candide. 'How many of them are good?'
'Fifteen or sixteen,' replied the abbe.
'That's a lot,' said Martin. ~ Voltaire

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

I like playwriting because it's rooted in a single location with actors standing talking to each other. ~ Amanda Peet

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

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

Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it. ~ Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

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

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

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

YOU HAVE TO ASK HARD QUESTIONS. ~ Tony Kushner

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

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

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

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

That's what I love most about writers
they're such lousy actors. ~ Vincent H. O'Neil

I majored in screenwriting and playwriting in school - and wanted to make films as a career. But when I directed my first short in college - which was called 'Extras' - I lost thousands of dollars and made an unsatisfying and incomplete film. ~ Mike Birbiglia

I'd rather be nine people's favorite thing than a hundred people's ninth favorite thing. ~ Jeff Bowen

As a youth I enjoyed - indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered - the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public's endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels's family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system - which is to say by the accrual of wealth - house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America. ~ David Mamet

Act One: Get your hero up a tree. Act Two: Throw rocks at him. Act Three: Get him down out of the tree. - attributed to George Abbott, on playwriting ~ Darrell Fusaro

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 matinee in Hull - it will teach you much more than a year of careful instruction. Come to think of it, I never did play to a good matinee in Hull ... ~ Noel Coward

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use. ~ Arthur Miller

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

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

When I got out of undergrad, I had a degree in theater and telecommunications. My first job, I was a news reporter for the local stories for NPR. Then I was a country-western DJ. I did data entry for a yearbook company. In my mid-20s I went back to grad school at NYU, and I specialized in playwriting. ~ Suzanne Collins

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

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

Making Life means making trouble ~ George Bernard Shaw

Your boss takes a dim view of SEX? ~ Vincent H. O'Neil

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

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