Preston Sturges Quotes

When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I'd constantly be that guy who'd get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.

I always wanted to tell stories and act.

My mother took me to a lot of operas and when I was eight I got the opportunity to be in one and I realized that transformation into these make-believe situations was possible. I decided that was essentially what I wanted to do with my life.

The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.

I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

The thing with drama is you're allowed to invent people who are maybe slightly better than real people.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It's storytelling.

I was always a performer even as a child; I loved delving into various characters.

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

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

When I was a kid, I used to make up all these characters. I love comedy a lot, and I don't get to do it often. Somewhere in the middle, I shifted into doing drama.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

Being an actor is an extension of telling a story and I loved story telling as a child.

There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.

The whole thing about acting, the draw for me, is the opportunity to do things you don't get to do in real life.