Quotes & Sayings About Playwriting

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits. — Vincent H. O'Neil

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 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

My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art. — August Wilson

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

Making Life means making trouble — George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays. — Gia Coppola

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

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

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

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

YOU HAVE TO ASK HARD QUESTIONS. — Tony Kushner

When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this," I said. "I don't know what to say."
"Say anything," he said. "You can't make a mistake when you improvise."
"What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?"
"You can't," he said. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another."
In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life. — Patti Smith

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.
But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life. — Tom Stoppard

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

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

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 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

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

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

This was the house that Paula had taken me and two other graduate students to years earlier. She had told us to go out on the deck, look at the view of the Atlantic Ocean, and say to ourselves, This is what playwriting can buy. Now, — Sarah Ruhl

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 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

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

I think of myself more as a filmmaker or as a film person than as strictly just a writer. I don't come out of playwriting or anything like that. — Peter Gould

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten. — Billy Collins

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

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

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

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

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

Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism. — John Patrick Shanley

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

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

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

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