Graham Greene Quotes

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

Perhaps one never seems so much at ones ease as when one has to play a part.

To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better.

I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.

Hence the genius of having Ken steer this ship as well. You have to invest these characters with a Shakespearian quality and not in a way that might disengage the audience but in a way that actually lets you play to an audience.

There's nothing personal in it [THE SKRIKER]. I'm not ever inclined with any of the plays to say, This is about that, because plays are about the whole event that they are. . . . I was certainly wanting to write a play about damage - damage to nature and damage to people, both of which there's plenty of about. To that extent, I was writing a play about England now.

I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.

The movie people would have nothing to do with me until they heard me speak in a Broadway play, then they all wanted to sign me for the silent movies.

When the play is still evolving I try to be at rehearsal as often as possible, and part of that casting process. You find new things when the language is living in different people's mouths.

If people don't actively knock the scenery over and they get the words out in something approximating the right order, you're moving on.

What most of us must be involved in--whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do--has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world.

The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.

I just wish that I had a part in everything Aaron Sorkin wrote. Sometimes I wish I was a member of an acting troupe where we all just kept working together, the same people. I can't, unfortunately, be in everything he writes. I'm excited for him, but I'm jealous that I wasn't a part of it.

It's exotic for me to be given a script that's already written, and be given a pay cheque, and asked to dress up and play, and that's all.

We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.

There were radio shows where you actually got to hear people play off of each other and get that immediate magic that goes on. And rather than doing what a lot of shows do, where an individual comes in, reads their part, and you edit it together later on and try to build a performance, we're lucky because this is really very much a theatrical performance that is going on, every single week.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

I think it's a shame when pop culture forgets that theatricality is a big part of it. When Neil Young is fumbling around in his pocket looking for the right harmonica, it doesn't matter that he's a dude in the hat who is a man of the people - there's a theatricality there. You don't have to be David Bowie or the Kabuki theater to have that theatricality going on.

I love theater. I go all the time. It's one of the reasons I moved to New York. But I understand that I have limited range as an actor. I can only play people who talk like me.

Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development.

It's not most important to communicate myself on stage as it is to be as funny or interesting as I possibly can on stage. I feel more like I'm doing a play whose main character just happens to share my name.