Atom Egoyan Quotes

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.

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.

I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.

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.

I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.

I was always into film, but theater was my entry point. I always felt like film didn't make sense to me, as a kid.

anyone who writes plays is unbelievably persistent, because there isn't a need in the world for plays. Somehow you internally have to feel a need to write a play.

Please God, I hope my experience in downtown theater isn't over, because I'd love to keep making weird plays. I can't wait for Charles Isherwood to call my next play 'sit-com-y' and tell me to stick to writing television.

My background is in theater. I was a theater major in college.

I think theater is very much my natural home. But the truth is that the older I've got, and the more I've written film and television, I find it incredibly hard to write theater.

I remember one play [when I was kid] was about this murderous mad scientist, and my whole part was to be the guy who got thrown into a vat of acid as the curtain went up. I was very pissed off at these older kids; they'd outsmarted me.

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

Like a dog, a playwright lives in an eternal present and a play is never closed.

As a dramatist, I don't have politics.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

I've always said I prefer theater, but there's only ever been one play that I really loved doing, and that was The Seagull.

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.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

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.

To write, you have to know how to act and know about directing. To act, you also need to know how to write and direct.

I love theatre - it's where I started - and I've directed a play myself. I'm not sure if I want to direct a film, but certainly, as an actress, I'm always thinking, 'Surely this must be my last film.'

I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff.

I always loved theater and acting in plays and directing, writing little plays and directing friends in plays.