Ellen McLaughlin Quotes

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.

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

For many playwrights, they write the plays anyway because they've got to be, the work has been started, it's got to be finished, but we all long, I think, to see the plays fleshed out on stage and I'm exactly like that. Yes, I'm not satisfied until I actually see it on stage.

I'm not a Shakespearean actor really, or a Shakespearean director.

I am trying to write a play that is big and I feel represents me - that's my big ambition.

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

Most difficult thing in the world, to write a play. Do you know the story of Shaw at the Fabian society? H.G. Welles said "I'm terribly sorry I've missed the last five meetings, I've been terribly busy, I'm engaged in writing a scientific pamphlet on the effects of radioactivity in 1984 and I've produced a novel, and various pieces of science fiction to do, and I've had a bit of personal trouble, and I had my copy to bring out for the newspaper." Shaw leapt up and said, "I've not missed one meeting, and I have written a play!" hardest thing in the world. If it were easy they'd all be at it.

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

I curse in everyday life, but usually when I stub my toe. The topics I'm discussing, it's not necessary to curse. I found [cursing] is a sign that a joke is not finished or well-written.

Writers love to write those idiotic, long stage directions, and some of them worse than others. They have nothing to do with the movie. They're just jerking around.

I deliberately look for colorful people. They're very right for theatre. Theatre has to be theatrical. If you can get color into the accountant, you've got something. Write the whole thing first and then say he's an accountant. That's a very wacky accountant, but so what? Theatricality feeds and challenges the actor, the director, and the designers.

Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech. Ben Jonson and he did gather humors of men daily wherever they came.

My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed.

Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?

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.

The truth is you don't like the theater except the times when you're in a room by yourself putting the play on paper.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

I realize how much I rely on the actors to really know the lines because I tend to forget what they are exactly, even though I've written them. I don't have them memorized. But when it's going well, there is that point where the actor starts to know more about the character than I do.

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 remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

What I'm really involved in when I'm writing is something that no one ever mentions when they see any play. Writing is like trying to make gunpowder out of chemicals. You have these words and sentences and the strange meanings and associations that are attached to the words and sentences, and you're somehow cooking these things all up so that they suddenly explode and have a powerful effect. That's what absorbs me from day to day in writing a play.

It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.