Jesse Kellerman Quotes

I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre.

I think the only directing I'd be any good at is theatre directing. It's the only thing I can see myself doing.

What you do, is you gradually become more and more experienced, and more and more realistic about dramatic tolerance, i.e. about how long the play should be.

On stage, I have felt most fulfilled as a playwright, for everything I create gets to grow and evolve with collaboration from directors, actors, and so on.

Why should I write a play? I don't have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that's what I'm here for, so I'd better do it.

I wrote my first play when I was nine. It was performed at Hampstead Theatre.

I did a brief stint with set design and stage design. And I tried playwriting, too.

A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance.

I've been so lucky to work with some great, great writers: Tony Kushner and Yasmina Reza.

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

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

I sit every once in a while and I think about plays and films I can do with William Petersen into our eighties. He's the most incredible scene partner I've ever had.

I'd always fantasized about writing a new play. Even when I had all this success in television, what I was daydreaming about in my dressing room is that one day I would do it.

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.

I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'

I wrote two plays before I was cast on 'The Neighbors.' They actually got published, which was cool.

Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

I am an internationally produced playwright.

My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

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.

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.

Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn't write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.

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

I'm probably only going to make 10 movies, so I'm already planning on what I'm going to do after that. That's why I'm counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.

It's been a huge honor to collaborate and create new theatre with new writers and to create theatre that will last after my lifetime. It's been in the most truthful way possible. It's my favorite thing to do.