Arthur Smith Quotes

I've always wanted to do a Shakespeare play.

I love how Shakespeare can really rip your heart out one second and then make you laugh the next. He's a master writer.

Sometimes the best way to make 'em laugh is to show 'em how you honestly feel.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

I see writing and acting as different parts of the same continuum. Writing is better for intense emotion. If you're very angry about something, you shouldn't present it as strongly when you're acting. But if you're really angry and writing about it, that's the best way to get it out and across.

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.

I like to play with tropes.

Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense, philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense.

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

When I first started painting candyland imagery, I was looking for the best possible metaphor for everything that is pleasure, desire and insatiability.