Richard Foreman Quotes

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

Now I can't wait to write my next play.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

I would like to write a play.

I'm not a playwright.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

I did plays in college, and I have half of a play. But I'm kind of stuck. I keep revisiting it so maybe it will move somewhere. There's something about plays where you can feel that sense of artifice at any moment.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.

I don't find writing for the theater that different from writing a rock song.

I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

I get passionate about certain subjects, and then I'll write a whole play around it.

When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.

Most of my favourite moments in film have been when I've had an opportunity to say something from scratch, something original, whether I jotted down a few lines or it came out in improvisation.

Before acting, I was always attracted to words, to literature - be they the words of Williams, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare or Moliere.

I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.

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.

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.

I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.

I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer has truly visualized, and then fulfilled, the vision of the world that he or she is creating.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.