Adam Rapp Quotes

#1. I don't see a lot of movies that portray the East Village as well as I think they can.

Adam Rapp

#2. I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort of narrative, and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.

Adam Rapp

#3. I think I'm a little more daunted by when the machinery of the play is really huge.

Adam Rapp

#4. On top of everything else, Boobie's got the clap.

Adam Rapp

#5. I think, for me, when I direct my own work it's just an extension of the authorship.

Adam Rapp

#6. A typical day for me is I'm writing when I'm not directing.

Adam Rapp

#7. I sat there for a moment and thought about my mom. It was her groans of pain that would get me the most. Sometimes they didn't even sound human. Sometimes she sounded like a cow, and for some weird reason, that made me think about hamburgers and I suddenly realized how starved I was.

Adam Rapp

#8. It was at that moment that I came to the conclusion that there is some link between plants and loneliness.

Adam Rapp

#9. I find that more and more I'm trying to entertain myself when I'm working, because I know the work's going to go to a horrible place.

Adam Rapp

#10. Back to his various modes of escape and survival. Because you have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.

Adam Rapp

#11. One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.

Adam Rapp

#12. I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn't intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, 'Well if I'm going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct.'

Adam Rapp

#13. I don't mind him not talking so much, because you can hear his voice in your heart; the same way you can hear a song in your head even if there isn't a radio playing; the same way you can hear those blackbirds flying when they're not in the sky

Adam Rapp

#14. My work is always more emotional than I am. My characters say things to each other that I get accused of not being able to say to my girlfriend.

Adam Rapp

#15. Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.

Adam Rapp

#16. I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I've lived here for sixteen years.

Adam Rapp

#17. Sometimes when I'm directing, the stage manager will have a good idea and that's okay with me.

Adam Rapp

#18. When it's just a few scenes and a couple of actors behaving in a room, I feel very confident with that.

Adam Rapp

#19. I was born in Chicago, then I spent most of my youth in Joliet, Illinois which is about thirty minutes south, and I went to a military academy for high school in Wisconsin. Then I went to college, on a basketball scholarship to a small school in Iowa, so I'm like Mr. Midwest.

Adam Rapp

#20. It's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life.

Adam Rapp

#21. When I came to New York, I was really awkward. I went to military academy for high school, so I didn't have the socialization that most kids do. When I got here, I was five years behind everybody. Talking to women was weird for me.

Adam Rapp

#22. I think auditioning can be very reductive and I just hate how actors work really hard and most of them aren't going to get the job, and I hate putting them through that.

Adam Rapp

#23. Mrs. Leene says I should think about people in the present tense.
"It forces you to take responsibility for them," she says.

Adam Rapp

#24. I find auditioning to be a very illusive process, where actors come in with this really big result with no process, so it's a lie already at work.

Adam Rapp

#25. I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive, and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry.

Adam Rapp

#26. The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train - either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work?

Adam Rapp

#27. I guess I'm just afraid of whats going to happen. Because you can't run forever. There's only so much pavement that the road makers lay down. After a while, the highway quits going north and it just turns into sky. And you can't go anywhere in the sky unless you have a plane or some kind of rocket.

Adam Rapp

#28. The house was full of murmuring voices. I could practically feel each room getting choked with the hot breath of other people.

Adam Rapp

#29. No one answered. You could hear the light buzzing over us. I love that sound. It means school isn't working, that the teachers are losing the battle.

Adam Rapp

#30. When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.

Adam Rapp

#31. I feel that I'd rather know an actors' work, or have an instinct about them and sit down and have coffee with them, or I'll see them in something and I'll see if I can get along with them in some way, shape, or form.

Adam Rapp

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

Adam Rapp

#33. I don't put big concepts on my work, and it's all often about keeping actors in a room together and not letting them leave.

Adam Rapp

#34. I've never really felt that I've had the right hair cut, or had the right clothes.

Adam Rapp

#35. When you're poor, you don't want anyone to know you're poor.

Adam Rapp

#36. It's strange, people have asked me what my schedule is and what is my process like, and I can't even answer it.

Adam Rapp

#37. I think because my brother was an actor and I just saw how he struggled through, I guess I'm sensitive to it.

Adam Rapp

#38. It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

Adam Rapp

#39. Whenever I've been in rehearsals, it's really fun, there's always laughing.

Adam Rapp

#40. When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.

Adam Rapp

#41. I've never really felt good at the parties, but I have enough friends now that I feel social, I used to feel very antisocial, but I think the theater helps.

Adam Rapp

#42. I was a jock in college and high school, but I didn't hang out with the jocks. I was sort of a nerd who didn't look like a nerd. I never really fit into any social set.

Adam Rapp

#43. My life has been in shambles, like my personal relationships, my laundry, paying bills now I have someone who pays my bills and it's always been a challenge because it overwhelms me.

Adam Rapp

#44. I don't like the sort of hierarchical, totalitarian type of room a lot of directors can find themselves in.

Adam Rapp

#45. Things were pretty cold-blooded back in Rockdale.
That's when my arms were so pretty I could hold them up to the light and see the veins curling all clean and smooth like little blue branches.

Adam Rapp

#46. I was so in love I went into my room and drank half a bottle of Robitussin.

Adam Rapp

#47. I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.

Adam Rapp

#48. You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.

Adam Rapp

#49. I would hope that the staffs at juvenile detention centers and reform schools are carefully chosen so that there is a community of support and hope.

Adam Rapp

#50. My Aunty Frisco used to say that a man who has a strong relationship with fire is capable of historical love, because the flames keep the passion flowing in the smaller parts of the soul.

Adam Rapp

#51. Love,
Jamie
P.S. I can't believe you're dying. Please don't die.

Adam Rapp

#52. I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.

Adam Rapp

#53. I think there is a complicated side effect to overcoming evil in that we are forever changed by it. I think after we ingest some of the cruelty of the world, it takes years off of our lives, but it also gives us wisdom and a little grace, hopefully a sense of compassion.

Adam Rapp

#54. 10. You have to deal with stuff on your own and that's all there is to it.

Adam Rapp

#55. Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov's work to modern playwrights', consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.

Adam Rapp

#56. I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than where they put your heart. Somewhere so deep inside that the doctors can't find it with all their machines and microcameras.

Adam Rapp

#57. There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper. A little beef and bingo at the Nugents'.

Adam Rapp

#58. There was a kind of physical anarchy that dominated most of my younger life. I was always too skinny, not hairy enough, my voice jumped around. It was a thing that drove me away from towel lines in gym class.

Adam Rapp

#59. I began stealing a lot of ideas from other directors I had worked with.

Adam Rapp

#60. I have to be entertained by what I'm writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.

Adam Rapp

#61. When I'm directing, I'm pretty much not writing, but when I'm not directing I am writing a lot. It's strange: people have asked me what my schedule is and what is my process like, and I can't even answer it. I don't keep regular hours.

Adam Rapp

#62. What I've learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.

Adam Rapp

#63. I love plays that have musical moments. I'm not a big fan of musicals per se, but I love straight plays that have musical edges to them. I don't know if I will ever be able to structure a musical, but 'Finer Noble Gases' is as close as I've gotten.

Adam Rapp

#64. Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.

Adam Rapp

#65. I saw 'Six Degrees of Separation' because my brother was in it. It was a watershed experience. It was theatrical and scary, and New York functioned like a character. John Guare became a hero for me.

Adam Rapp

#66. I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.

Adam Rapp

#67. I've been living in Portland for five months and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I probably won't really know for years because that's how it works right? You don't really develop feelings about a place till you've left it. It's like a girl or a dog.

Adam Rapp