dramatic composition Quotes

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.

The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.

I am now in the full maturity of my age and vigor of my mind. Persons of various descriptions have repeatedly solicited me to turn my mind to dramatical composition. It was, indeed, the first amusement of my thoughts in my school-boy cell.

The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.

The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.

Like a dog, a playwright lives in an eternal present and a play is never closed.

It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare over the years. You start to realise how the plays fit together; he's always using pieces from one and slotting them into others.

I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.

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.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

Drama is the most difficult of all arts. In it two things are to be satisfied - first, the ears, and second, the eyes. To paint a scene, if one thing be painted, it is easy enough; but to paint different things and yet to keep up the central interest is very difficult. Another difficult thing is stage - management, that is, combining different things in such a manner as to keep the central interest intact.

I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.

I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.

I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write it out.

Shakespeare's last play was called The Tempest. It wasn't called just plain Tempest. The name of my record is just plain Tempest. It's two different titles.

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter.

You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.

I'm basically a writer, it's who I am. I direct and I like theatre directing very much. But I've done 17 movies, they don't say 'Let's get Garry, he'll make a helicopter shot,' they say 'Get Garry, he'll fix the script.'

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.