William Saroyan Quotes

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.

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

I also write plays, so I understand the writers mind, and how obsessed you can get writing.

I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.

[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you're clearing a path and getting to the right place.

When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.

I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.

At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.

I like having the script before I start. With new plays, you're constantly developing as you're doing it. It's really frightening. You don't quite know how it's going to end up.

I would like to write a play.

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

I never write a play with an eye to film.

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.

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.

When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go.

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 discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development.

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.

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

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

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

You don't ever know with films. You just hope for the best, but sometimes it's a bit of a crapshoot.

The hardest thing is to write a play, because you have to hold their attention for two hours, and if you let them go for five minutes, they're gone for good.

When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.