Stephen Adly Guirgis Quotes

I personally love a cliffhanger - I think it just extends the pleasure of viewing.

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.

You don’t know what’s going to happen in the end, and that’s what the best plays are.

There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.

Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.

It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again.

If the question was did we want to delay the revelation?... Yeah, you want to delay it as long as possible because the audience knows that that moment is coming and you want to make them wait for it. They have to suffer a bit.

The thing I always say to any writer that I'm working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.

Having the audience know more than the characters is precisely where you want to be in terms of drama. You can engage them much more when that is the case.

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

When I read the scripts, I'm always so excited to see what's going to happen because it's unpredictable.

A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.

Each kind of story has its own problems in writing, but my main concern really is to keep the reader on his toes, or to keep the strip unpredictable. I try to achieve some sort of balance between the two that keeps the reader wondering what's going to happen next and be surprised.

Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.

Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.

I have a great deal of hope. I think that change is here, it's happening. But I know that if we think it's just going to happen on its own, that's not the way it works. We need people to keep talking about women of color writing comics and living the charge. Not just talking but doing. Making art, putting it out there.

The secret to all drama, film, TV, or books - the thing that people respond to most, and the thing I find myself as a viewer feeling most interested in, is the idea of change.

I wonder who I left behind on the other side of fame.

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.

The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.

Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Great art is more than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul's self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being. Its discipline is not distinct from enjoyment but by reason of it. It transforms the soul into the permanent realization of values extending beyond its former self.