George Pierce Baker Quotes

Characterization is integral to the theatrical experience.

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.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

I would like to write a play.

To tell your story, you have to include others.

Action is drama. If we cannot make the audience laugh, smile or cry with us, we are not actors.

Every time I go to the theater, there's something about the atmosphere, seeing something unfold live in front of an audience, that you can't get out of your system.

On the stage, you have to find truth, even if you have to lose the audience.

People love to be told stories, but it's the sugar that draws you into the theater.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas. Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.

Big stories have lots of angles, and you have to decide what part of that story you want to address.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

There are an infinite number of ways to be moved in the theater.

I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.

Drama is drama, and it's really... if it's something small, you put a magnifying glass up to it; if it's something big, you use a wide lens.

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.

I love theater. I love the idea that you can transform, become somebody else, and look at life with a completely new perspective. I love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen.

Drama and comedy, to me, are all about being surprising, coherent, and true, all at once.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

There are only three indispensable things: the audience, the actor and the author. The rest is dross.

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

Drama read to oneself is never drama at its best, and is not even drama as it should be.

When you do a really good play, the audience and the performers are looking into the same looking glass, the same microscope. And the specimen they are looking at is human life and that's why I do it, that's why I like it.