Colm Toibin Quotes

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

That's one of the beauties of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim and their work together. They have such a depth to the emotional exploration of the story that they're telling, but there's always a release, and the release is a laugh.

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.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

You have to have a strong idea for a hit movie, a strong core idea that resonates emotionally. It also has to technically achieve its goal - it's got to be well-written, well-paced, and interestingly told.

Connection is what one is after in probably most media, but certainly in film, which is an immersive medium.

I love comedy, but it's dramas that stick with me.

When you see a singer on stage who is 100% committed to the personality, character and temperament of the role being sung, it's truly awesome and very powerful.

I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.

I was a very good girl for a long time, that's what really drew me to acting. The stage was the perfect place to be outrageous, to be sad, to be angry, to be all these different things.

I think on 'Third Watch' that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn't having a fun time.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

I'd say there are two kinds of theater: one you end with an answer, one you end with a question.

Theatre is, occasionally, capable of moments of truth.

I want to create a TV show that people will watch and say, 'Hey, I have a favorite character,' or 'Hey, that person reminds me of myself,' or 'Hey, I've made some of those same mistakes, or those are some of the things I've dealt with.'

I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.

I like to ground plays in reality so they can jump higher. So we can account for the trampoline, so we can account for the leap.

The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.

Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about.

It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport.