Michael Mando Quotes

Theatre is highly satisfying in terms of words. You get to speak in monologues; words drive the action.

I went to drama school for three years, and the whole thing there is that hopefully you are introduced to a man called William Shakespeare who is the greatest of all time of all storytelling.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre.

Someday I'd love to do Shakespeare.

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.

I think my strength is always been in being very natural. I think Shakespeare and things like that would be more a stretch for me.

I love novels, but I'm not a novelist. I'm just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That's all I have ever wanted to do.

There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.

My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.

As an actress, I am always interested in the new writers.

It's communication - that's what theatre is all about.

It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.

I'm a dramatist.

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.

Doing Shakespeare on stage with Kenneth Branagh, I don't think it gets better than that.

A storyteller is basically what actors and writers are.

My background is on the stage, so when I'd write movies, they'd be a lot like plays.

What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

Shakespeare is rich and beautiful, and it can be an amazing experience to read and to watch and to work on.

My brother Trev went to the Professional Performing Arts School in New York, and he used to do his monologues and stuff and rehearse in our apartment. So I used to hear him all the time doing these things over and over and over. And when I was a little girl, I used to soak up everything - like anything anyone did, I soaked it up.

I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare.

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

I was trained as a straight dramatist.