Stephen Colbert Quotes

I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.

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.

I love composing and writing music and dancing and performing and conceptualizing creatively for visual mediums. I love to create.

You start out performing because it's fun, then you learn more things and you want to do more than go "Na-na-na-na" on a stage. The production end is interesting, writing is interesting, and you learn to coordinate all these things.

You learn to write by doing it.

I've been involved in burlesque for a really long time and I've always been really interested in burlesque, and I was writing musicals for different studios.

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.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

I learned to write by writing.

Music and acting are the same thing: you must understand that art is only the search, not the final form.

The writing is amazing because having a hand in creating what you're going to be performing... there's nothing like it. It's always going to be better suited for you. You're always going to know the lines faster, because you wrote it. The writing is so very hard. It's the hardest part of the whole process. In some ways the acting is a lot easier and a lot more fun.

I could never write. I would just be too lonely. What's great about acting is, it's so collaborative.

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.

The writing is therapeutic for me, it's an introverted process, I'm really inside my head. It's a really obsessive process. The live show, though, is the opposite. It's an extroverted process. It pushes me to connect with people, and so it pulls me out of my head and just pulls me out of myself.

I've always had a really great time being in movies and writing music when I get home. The more creative I am, the more it feeds into other creative aspects of my life.

Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.

In a way I'd say it's maybe more satisfying to do a play, because there is a beginning, middle, and end. But I also really enjoy the television experience, because there's a certain part of it that you have to let go of and trust in that process.

I had a lot of fun writing things that died during dress rehearsal. Sometimes I remember the crazy ones that died even more fondly than the ones that did really well.

Start early and work hard. A writer's apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he's almost ready to begin. That takes a while.

Theater is the best. That's where you get the work done. You just really get in there and figure something out about a story or a character or life or the world. That's where magic stuff happens.

I feel so fortunate to get paid to be an actor. I pinch myself. I get it from writing, I get it from baking, gardening... I sort of open myself to the creative flow, which is hard to do, by the way.

Theater is completely different from film or television. It has a beginning and a middle and an end and it's different every night. And it's far preferable to any other except in the sense of not getting paid, people who want to eat should do film and television.

I never write anything down. I write onstage.

I've always loved film more than theater, and film may be more closely related to making a record because you have that ability to go in and do your work and have no judgment around it, and feel honest. Then, much later, it's presented to people. But in theater, people come backstage after a performance and you're about to do the same play again the next night, and people say, "Well, I didn't really believe that emotion" or whatever. It's really hard for me, I like to be closed up and just do the work.

I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist.