Domestic Drama Quotes

I don't like writing straight-up thrillers. I like writing about families hurled into crisis and danger - soccer moms and regular dads and husbands who might have to rescue their daughters or who are, say, hedge fund managers and have one foot on the sidelines watching their kids and the other in nefarious cover-ups and conspiracies.

I was elated when I found out my first novel, 'Leaving Patrick,' about a woman who walks out on her husband, was going to be published.

More than any other setting - more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel - I'll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.

I've always been interested in family secrets and what happens behind closed doors. I find that fascinating and creepy - that's why I read: because I want to know other people's secrets.

My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.

I was brought up in Guildford, and I think I used to absorb all the suburban things - seeing coffee mornings, women talking... that stuff, really. I was watching Alan Ayckbourn on some documentary, and he was talking about how he was around a lot of women as a child, listening to all that stuff.

My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.

Some of Eminem's rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It's kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller.

The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

I have a preference for writing that deals with domestic issues; even in visual art, I like work that focuses on very small aspects of human life. I like movies that have a very narrow focus. I can see how it might be viewed as limiting, but I don't experience it that way.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

A man's house is his stage. Others walk on to play their bit parts. Now and again a soliloquy, a birth, an adultery.

He also tried to block the doorway when she left him. My mother ducked under his arm, ran to her car, and drove away. I remember thinking that this was somehow romantic, as it pinpointed the actual memory of my mother's departure, something you don't see a lot of in television. Real people don't slam doors without opening them five minutes later because it's raining and they forgot their umbrella. They don't stop dead in their tracks because they realize they're in love with their best friend.They don't say, "I'm leaving you, Jack," and fade to a paper towel commercial.

'Family Secrets' is thought provoking, well written, and remorselessly intelligent.

I would write scripts and little plays and perform them in the living room for my family when I was little with my brother until my mom said, 'Alright, you need to go do it somewhere else other than the house.'

The best theatre I've done, I've done right here in this living room.

It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories; so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and driveways.

I think American drama is at its best when it takes the domestic and makes it epic, like a Greek tragedy in the front room.

I particularly relate to the films of Mikio Naruse and Shinichi Kamoshita, a person whose work I watched very much as a child, a director of family dramas for television.

The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.

The big dramas that fascinate me are the quiet ones that happen behind closed doors in so-called ordinary families.

I'd like to do more family dramas.

I want to show that drama doesn't lie only in blood and destroyed buildings but in daily life, in ordinary human beings.

With 'Carol,' I was just really looking at and thinking about the love story as a genre, not the domestic melodrama.