John Guare Quotes

I only understand realism.

Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you're playing a tender love story that's set in a coffee shop or whether you're in 'The Avengers,' which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.

I've always been taught to just play the truth of the situation. If comedy comes out of that, or drama, whatever comes out of it, at least I'm playing the truth of the moment-to-moment reality.

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.

I think everything needs to be played real, for reality's sake, for truth. And that is the drama and the comedy. When you do that, it's funnier. And when you do that, you really do hit the emotional beats. I do it the same way as I do a drama. I just play it for truth, and then maybe have a little bit of fun with it sometimes.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

Even though I'm an actor, even though I know a little bit about film, I very much view things as an audience member. For me, whether it's TV, film, theater, whatever, it's a big movie, a small movie, whatever it is, I look for the truth in it. I look for the honesty. I just look for if it feels honest and real to me.

What we want is to be real. Let us not appear to be more than we are. Don't let us put on any cant, any assumed humility, but let us be real; that is the delight of God. God wants us to be real men and women, and if we profess to be what we are not, God knows all about us. God hates sham.

There are very few films or plays or anything about really happy people with perfect lives. Everyone is usually screwed up in some way and that is usually where the work comes in - figuring out how to make it believable and make it real to present someone.

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

The real thing creates its own poetry.

I was trying to play as real possible - I wanted everything to be real.

In The Black Power Mixtape , you hear the voice of Angela Davis - not someone playing Angela Davis.

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

For me, making a lot of dramas on one side it's a different sort of challenge, and on the other, it's not a challenge at all, meaning that my goal is to try and bring the realism and acting you might find in a straight drama with the intentions and conflict, where it doesn't feel tongue-in-cheek, but rather committed and real.

I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.

The more perfect the approximation to truth, the more perfect is art.

I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.

I love shooting with real things in the real world. I think it gives a level of drama, performance, and everything seems to rise to the occasion.

I might tell a story about somebody else, but I don't sit there and do a story about somebody snitching on me selling coke because people know I didn't sell coke. So I just try to keep it real but still try to do it in a creative way.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

Actors, said Granny, witheringly. As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more.