Sarah Waters Quotes

I think theater is powerful. The best experiences I had in the theater are more powerful than the best experiences I had in movies.

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.

Theater is about life, not about television or movies.

But theatre is always a difficult experience.

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.

Theatre should be a taxing experience: the greatest achievement of a writer is to produce a character who creates anxiety.

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

Artistic ambition is important. And it seems it would be a great time to do some theatre, like a new extreme.

With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I'm interested in the theater because I'm interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

I became an actress to provoke people and move people and to tell the stories.

As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

You can't be a playwright without believing there's an audience for adventurous work.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

I don't know why every actor doesn't do more plays.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions.

Theater is great because you're able to tell a narrative arc without a break. I think it's more about the material and whether what we get offered is good.

There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.

If I have a long period of time away from acting, I tend to write.