Writing Plays Quotes

One of the things about what . . . I do - writing plays - is that a poll is not taken before you say, Well, I'm going to write this because I think that you're going to like this and therefore you'll buy a ticket for this.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.

Most difficult thing in the world, to write a play. Do you know the story of Shaw at the Fabian society? H.G. Welles said "I'm terribly sorry I've missed the last five meetings, I've been terribly busy, I'm engaged in writing a scientific pamphlet on the effects of radioactivity in 1984 and I've produced a novel, and various pieces of science fiction to do, and I've had a bit of personal trouble, and I had my copy to bring out for the newspaper." Shaw leapt up and said, "I've not missed one meeting, and I have written a play!" hardest thing in the world. If it were easy they'd all be at it.

As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can't write a play.

It's hard to explain why exactly, but I think that when I began writing plays, it was from an actor's point of view more than anything. I had the feeling that if you put yourself in the position of the actor on stage and write from that perspective, it would give you a certain advantage in terms of being inside of the play.

When I was at UCLA, a professor there encouraged me to write, and so I looked into specializing in creative writing in the English Department. And through that, I started writing plays.

I got really into writing plays. I did that for years and years and got some produced and didn't like it as much when I wasn't able to control it.

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.

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.

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced-although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world-what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done.

Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.

By the time I started writing plays, Broadway was never an expectation, so it's never been central.

I have a nice little movie career, and I write plays and do my act.

I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.

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.

In the theater, when people hear that you're writing a play, they want to know what it's all about, whether there's a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you're really ready to have company.

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 have to work really hard, eight shows a week, to get a nice check as an actor. But when I write a play, and it's a - knock wood - hit, the checks come in for many years.

Some of the things I've done in my life, I've done to make money because I had to make money... and some things I did just because they were on my mind and they were of interest to me... some of the little plays I wrote.

I'm an actor and a playwright, and I don't earn much.