Terrence McNally Quotes

I write my plays to create an excuse for full-tilt acting and performing.

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

The one overall structure in my plays is language.

A play visibly represents pure existing.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.

I love to act, I've always wanted to be an actor. I think that acting and fiction go nicely together - being able to visualize language as something you perform, not just something that's there on the page.

As an actor, I feel like youre asked to live life as vibrantly as possible.

I know people think that acting is not quite the occupation of grown-ups, but it is actually the ultimate learning process: You get a multitude of experiences, all for the price of one life.

The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.

Acting was always a part and faucet of my life. It just comes very natural. I think it's a good thing.

You're always fighting the contradiction between the supposed intimacy of a two-person conversation and the blunt reality that you're trying to sell the play to people who are sitting maybe too far away from you.

[Vincent Price] did Oscar Wilde on Broadway, and I think he probably did it because he was almost like an Oscar Wilde. He had that brilliant humor.

I'm addicted to acting.

I've often thought that it would be great to do some acting because nobody would think that I would be able to do it and it scares the living hell out of me.

I have mainly been interested in acting. I think it's a great job, a fine way to live your life.

The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life.

I'm not an actor, and I'll never call myself an actor. I've never thought of it as part of my life. I'll always be a singer, in my eyes.

I'm interested in the moments where the audience is restless. I'm interested in the moments where they lean in and become incredibly engaged: the laughter, the silence. All of that is part of how I think about shaping and rewriting the play.

I would like to say something deeper, but for me, I saw a production of "Fences" in Rhode Island and a fabulous actress played Rose, but when she first came on the stage she was mad. You could just see it. She was all, "Troy stop!" So by the time you get to the revelation scene, I didn't think she loved him, so there was no loss. I think that the real tragedy and the real drama or the thing that makes you lean in is to see the love, to see the commitment. To see the fact that Rose is invested in this marriage no matter what.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

There is one way by which a strolling player may be ever secure of success; that is, in our theatrical way of expressing it, to make a great deal of the character. To speak and act as in common life is not playing, nor is it what people come to see; natural speaking, like sweet wine, runs glibly over the palate and scarcely leaves any taste behind it; but being high in a part resembles vinegar, which grates upon the taste, and one feels it while he is drinking.

Sometimes I think, 'To hell with acting' and then I realize I could be working at a shoe shop. Acting is much cooler.

I think that theater is the closest medium to music. It's very pure. It's for the elite of the society. It's not for everyone in the society.

It's actually easier to play a leading role than it is to play a supporting role.

I think for acting on stage and in film, one informs the other. Obviously, they require really different kinds of discipline and really different kinds of work. It's more along the same continuum, for me.