Paul Beatty Quotes

What you don't see backstage is what really controls the show.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

Whenever anybody is pursuing power, he's got to be funny.

He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.

I think everything that I learned about stagecraft and carrying through - creating a through point for a theatrical device.

He resisted for a while and there were some legal boundaries, you know, keeping me from being near him or his family, but in the end, love overcame. And I got what I wanted. I always get what I want.

I built stages and I did stage management - I think I built the sets twice, I happened to be good with a drill, which is a talent I didn't know I had.

They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.

I love being backstage, or doing littler things like Blame Canada.

So I still seized the power, but I felt that if I officially made myself the boss, in black and white, it would be too intimidating for the other producers and the other men who worked on the show. In other words, I had the power, but I gave them the title.

I've been dealing with politicians all my life. All my life. And I've always gotten them to do what I need them to do.

In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.

Every man's dream is to be able to sink into the arms of a woman without also falling into her hands.

Film is something that came later into my life. I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling - a vocation.

It's possible for people to gain control of every facet of your life.

Where power is concerned, the theater enters.

Conkling -- the power behind the throne, superior to the throne.

I was creating characters early. People didn't beat me up. I scared them. I hated authority. I could also get people to do things; I was quite the early director. I could make people laugh enough to get their defences down - and then brainwash them.

If you get to thinking you're a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else's dog around.

I was 16 at the time, and I came backstage and started hanging out with them. I said, "Well, maybe you can 'vanish' the silk this way." The opening was a black stage while the "Magic to Do" song started playing. All you saw were hands, lit by Jules Fisher, and then Ben Vereen would appear beyond the hands, and at the end of the scene he would vanish a silk. The spotlight would hit a red spot on the floor where you'd see the silk on the floor. He'd pull the silk out of the floor and it became the entire set coming out of the floor.

She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

As a dramatist, I don't have politics.

The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.

Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.