Terrence McNally Quotes

I never found a professional environment that made the production of plays efficient. Teamwork is demanded, but there are very few teams.

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.

The books are always there, just the way you wrote them. The plays often don't turn out the way you wanted them to because in the theater, you're always involved with collaborators and they don't always see the work the way you do.

Actors, I think, are all the same. Both Korean actors and American actors are all very sensitive people, and they are all curious to know what the director thinks of them and how they are evaluated, and they try to satisfy the director. And they like it if you listen carefully to their opinions and accept them.

I had such a good experience doing 'The Understudy' with the Roundabout, and people were really enthusiastic about the work.

Good actors can tell you more about your play than 1,000 hours alone at your desk.

We just had to stay out-of-the-way [in Fences]. [August Wilson] already wrote a masterpiece. And you really don't know how it's going to work until you get it in front of an audience.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.

The collaboration really begins once the rehearsal starts. This is when the actor takes his place, because he becomes the one who is going to bring the words of the author off the page.

I love working with actors. I love visual things. I always intended to be a writer who directs and a director who writes.

The character of Brent Spiner. We certainly collaborate on the concept of that, but he basically writes the script, then it's sort of a combination of his voice and my voice.

I think if you can write a play, or produce a play, the first step toward success [is] if people don't want to kill themselves in the lobby. Now there must be four or five other steps, but that's the first.

Plays have to be made, and we have to find a way to make them. All of us.

I called Scott Rudin, and I told him I wanted to do the play [Fences], so that's how the ball got rolling. I never said, "I'll do the play, and the next year I'll do the film, I just wanted to do the play."

You're not just writing in a vacuum, and then handing it over to someone else to shoot. You're writing, and then getting feedback from the actor and hearing their voice and how they play things.

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff.

I come alive when I have assisted in bringing out the printed word on the stage, you know, and I enjoy directing plays. It's a tactile process, theatre, unlike a number of other forms of the creative work.

Sometimes I think the experience of a play is finished for me when I finish writing it. If it weren't for the need to make a living, I don't know whether I'd have the plays produced.

I can write the stuff and play it myself and have something in my head, but the best feeling is when somebody else plays it and they're hearing something other than what I'm hearing.

It's strange, 'cause a play, you start at the beginning and you go all the way through to the end. So it's naturally very well rehearsed and you get a rhythm and a flow. In film, you can shoot the ending before the beginning. It's very odd. And it's like a craft you have to learn.

I've never worked with a co-author before [Alison McGhee]. Writing for me is a pretty scary thing, so it was a huge comfort to have someone in the room working with me. It became less like work and more like play.

Writing a screen play with a group of collaborators is like the Lennon McCartney collaboration .... sometimes one or two people do more than others on certain parts of the process and vice versa.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.