Theater Writing Quotes

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.

I know I'm really good at writing for the theater. I can deny it all I want. Other people can fight me on it. It doesn't really matter. It's the thing I happen to know is my gift.

The things that I have done that haven't been as successful have been things that have been largely out of the public view, which is great. It's terrible, when you're a theater writer, to have a big flop publicly.

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

I don't find writing for the theater that different from writing a rock song.

I found it was my good fortune to somehow be able to work in these forms that I loved when I was a kid. I love movies and I could write screenplays. I love theater and I could write plays. I mean, they would be my own, I could never write what was used to be called the well-made play. But my first play, "Little Murders," turned out to be a great success and a great influence on plays at that time.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.

I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors.

The theater's much the most difficult kind of writing for me, the most naked kind, you're so entirely restricted.... I find myself stuck with these characters who are either sitting or standing, and they've either got to walk out of a door, or come in through a door, and that's about all they can do.

When I write a play, and we read it for the first time, the great fear is that everybody is going to say, 'You're a bum and you can't write. This stinks.' and throw the script in the garbage. The great hope is that they're all going to lift me up on their shoulders and carry me to the streets, singing, 'He's a genius, he's a genius!'

When you find theater writing like in the theater on film but it's realistic, it doesn't matter who the character is, you want to do it.

I would absolutely be interested in doing a Broadway production if it was the right project. But my dream is to be writing pieces of theater for my best friends and putting on plays in New York City and seeing our vision come alive. I just hope to always be creating.

I'm not doubtful that I am doing what I should be doing - writing for theater - and that I'm doing it in a way no one else does it. Whether anyone else is paying attention or anyone else cares, I'm still ambivalent about that. It's still an open question.