Richard Greenberg Quotes

I think if you can write a play, or produce a play, the first step toward success [is] if people don't want to kill themselves in the lobby. Now there must be four or five other steps, but that's the first.

I hoped, hoped, that maybe I'd be lucky enough to do something on Broadway, in the chorus.

I'd like to do a play in New York.

I'm not denying that it's exciting to have a play on Broadway.

I keep fooling people into giving me jobs, and now I'm on Broadway. It's always something I've wanted to be a part of, and I can't believe that this is the experience I'm having.

I don't really have any plans in terms of what I want to do - movies, television, theater - but I'd love to do a play in New York.

I'd like to have one of my plays on Broadway.

I had started doing small community theater shows in my hometown of Cleveland. I did a lot of shows there before I met this director who told me, 'Listen, I really think you could be on Broadway.' And I was like, 'No, that's crazy.' I didn't believe it... I was 9, maybe 8 years old at the time, and I was like, 'No. No way.'

The only thing I've ever wanted to do in my entire life is to be on Broadway.

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.

I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced-although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world-what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done.

If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.

Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.

In a perfect world, I would love to do one play for every three movies.

Walter Matthau made all the big money and he was wonderful as Oscar Madison on the stage. You couldn't beat him. I know because I replaced him on Broadway. He was just delightful.

John Cassavetes wrote A Woman Under the Influence as a play. He said, "Hey, I wrote you a play." And I said, "Great, let's read it." I read it and I said, "John, I couldn't do this every night and twice on Wednesday and Saturday".

I never write a play with an eye to film.

I've been dealing with so much press for Brooklyn, and now I am rehearsing for a play, and it is hard.

Opening a play is just tough. The idea that actors are weirdly protected from it is a myth. If you imagine yourself having to spend two and a bit hours cooking bolognaise, remembering a whole major work by David Hare and speaking it at the correct moment between chopping carrots and stirring the onions in front of an audience - the normal human response is 'Please, can I go to the airport?'

I'm not a theater rat, so I never got a theatrical agent and did a play. I came really close though.

It just happened that we did [Fences] seven years ago on Broadway. Scott Rudin brought me August Wilson's original screenplay for it, and I realized I hadn't read the play. So I read it. Then I realized that Troy (my character) was 53 - and I was 55 at the time. I realized I better hurry up! I might be too old!

Plays have to be made, and we have to find a way to make them. All of us.

I got really into writing plays. I did that for years and years and got some produced and didn't like it as much when I wasn't able to control it.

All the world's a stage.

It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.