George Pierce Baker Quotes

Movies are more than a commodity. Movies are to our civilization what dreams and ideals are to individual lives: They express the mystery and help define the nature of who we are and what we are becoming.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I always do drama. It's just that some people laugh at it and some people cry.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

The drama is a great revealer of life.

I really think 'Spring Awakening' is unlike any other show. At the end of the day, I hope people are moved by it... whether they love it or they find it uncomfortable. I hope this show can awaken something in them, or reminds them of their childhood, or offers a bit of assurance to what teenagers are going through. It's a great piece of theater.

It's one of the functions of the theater to shock and titillate and appall, apart from entertain and delight.

I love fantasy. I love horror. I love musicals. Whatever doesn't really happen in life is what I'm interested in. As a way of commenting on everything that does happen in life, because ultimately the only thing I'm really interested in is people.

Like all art, nonfiction film should invite, seduce, or force us to confront the most difficult, frightening or mysterious aspects of what it means to be human.

I have come to the conclusion there is no point making anything if you're not going to make people laugh and cry.

tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

I want people to laugh and cry, not just sit and stare at the TV.

You can go to a play that is enjoyable because it's funny, and then on the next night you can go to a play that's enjoyable because it's 'disturbing.'

I don't feel there's a difference between the real world and the fairy-tale world. They contain psychological truths and, I guess, projections of what the culture that tells them thinks about various things: men, women, aging, dying - the most basic aspects of being human.

I am a passionate believer that comedy is a way of tackling some of the most dark and difficult aspects of being a human being.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.

I want you to laugh and cry. That's what I do.

I want art to make me think. In order to do that, it may piss me off, or make me uncomfortable. That promotes awareness and change, or at least some discussion.

I don't tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges. But because I don't, when I do, it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic

Movies should make people uncomfortable sometimes.

That's what happens in a good horror movie: there are always metaphors of greater subjects like humanity and empathy and compassion. It's not about the action and scary moments: You really care about these characters because they're mirrors of our own reflections.