Rodman Philbrick Quotes

I think, basically, I am an actor. Sometimes I'm an actor who's writing and sometimes an actor who's directing, but I think if I'm forced to fill out a form for my tax return, 'actor' is the first thing I write down.

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.

A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.

To see professional actors do my work, to take it seriously - that was the thing that made me think playwriting could actually be what I do. It's not a profession that has some sort of clear career track, like, 'This is what you do to be a playwright.'

I was thrown into a community production of 'Bye Bye Birdie' or something when I was a kid. I wanted to just build the sets, but I wasn't allowed to just build the sets unless I auditioned for the play. So I auditioned for the play and was thrown into the chorus. During the course of that I fell in love with it, and I never really turned back.

I'm not a playwright.

It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.

I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.

Stage performing is a dying art form.

When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.

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 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.'

'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams is a great play. I had to read it for school when I was younger, but I started writing scripts after that. That's what got me into writing.

My main ambitions, really, are in the theatre.

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet.

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

You can't be a playwright without believing there's an audience for adventurous work.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

I think I am a writer, but professionally I feel drawn to and suited for directing.

By the time I started writing plays, Broadway was never an expectation, so it's never been central.

Playwrights are naturally wary and protective - God, who's more protective than a playwright? You read a play, the playwright wants to hear from you immediately.

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

I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

I never wanted to be a playwright.