Dramatic Conflict Quotes

Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.

And what’s he then that says I play the villain?

If you pick up an eighteenth-century play, at the top it says 'The Argument,' and then you have a list of characters, and then you have the play. I was just always struck by that - that, of course, good drama is about conflict.

Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings.

What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.

A playwright who limits himself - or is limited - to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray.

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.

The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays.

I wrote the poems in Charms Against Lightning one by one, over almost a decade, and I did not write them toward any theme or narrative. But once I really got serious about putting together a book, I began to see that in fact there were themes across the poems, if only because my own obsessions had brought me back time and again to the same ground. I realized that any ordering of the poems would determine how those themes developed over the manuscript, and how the collection's dramatic conflicts were resolved.

Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.

I do tend to gravitate to the more dramatic side of things. I love feeling intense emotions when I'm acting. I just love characters and stories with conflict.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

I can tell stories to other actors about the level of aggression on stage in the '70s between actors - it was unbelievable.

Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.

Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.

I know the world of opera so intimately: historical sweep, sharply defined characters, not too rational an explanation of what's going on. It's a feast.

Every scene has two people who want two different things, so there's conflict in every scene. You've got to duke it out, and you've got to get the other person to change his or her mind and do it your way.

Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.

Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either.

In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.

I always think the villains in all of the Disney movies are almost operatic in scale.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

My concept of drama requires obstacles, and there's no obstacles in comfort.