John Guare Quotes

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 started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

I have seen dozens upon dozens of productions of 'Lebensraum' in dozens of languages around the globe.

We've got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.

Talking to actors is the same as talking to any other artists; it's getting into the moment for them, and making sure they can lose themselves in the performance!

Having grown up around the theater, I've been moved by so many plays. Being a part of it, however small, is special.

Opera is a very stimulating place to work, and I believe it offers the most intense theatrical experience possible.

The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.

I love theater. I think theater, when its done right, is the best, like a religious experience. When it is done badly, it's the worst thing. It's just an incredible experience.

Focus on the play like it has a history and a life of its own.

Art is a continuous activity with no separation between past and present.

When you come to actually act, it's a game. It may be a very serious game, but it's still a game. If you lose that sense of play, the work suffers.

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.

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.

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.

An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

The performance is created by the director. The actor is the material. And I think that has to be true.

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better when you can get it.

I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development.

One of the greatest things I've learned, as an actor, was how to talk to actors.

It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.

Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.