How To Write A Play Quotes

#1. 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.

Eugene O'Neill

#2. I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.

Tom Stoppard

#3. I can't compose or play music; I'm not that fortunate. But I can write and I can talk and sometimes when I'm doing either of these things I realize that I've written a sentence or uttered a thought that I didn't absolutely know I had in me ... until I saw it on the page or heard myself say it.

Christopher Hitchens

#4. When I was growing up, my parents asked me what I wanted to do, and I said that I wanted to live in Springfield. They were like, "Well, that's not how it works. There is an actor who play Homer, and someone who writes what Homer says." So, I was like, "Well, I want to write what Homer says."

Jonah Hill

#5. I write lyrics. I play the guitar. If the rest of the band had to do my schedule, they would be dead

John Frusciante

#6. I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

Alan Rickman

#7. I've worked with genius performers. Sometimes they created great work with a bad script ... but not often. Play it safe: write well.

Jerry Juhl

#8. If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

Paul Schrader

#9. I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.

Otis Rush

#10. 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.

Tracy Letts

#11. In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have ... But I never did write a play.

Alice McDermott

#12. When I think of the play of force and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could write an epic on the grass.

Jack London

#13. Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.

Alan Alda

#14. I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

Chris Isaak

#15. I cannot write music. I cannot play the piano.

Jayne Meadows

#16. Anyone who writes plays is unbelievably persistent, because there isn't a need in the world for plays. Somehow you internally have to feel a need to write a play.

Wendy Wasserstein

#17. My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy.

Philip Glass

#18. For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.

Wallace Shawn

#19. If I'm feeling like rock, we'll do some of that, and if I'm feeling some other way, we might do some of that. So, that's typically how I record and write and play music and anything else.

Chris Stapleton

#20. I love Darius Rucker. He's a true artist, a great songwriter who can play his instrument, sing and write about his life.

Randy Houser

#21. Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

John Steinbeck

#22. As we all saw in grade school, once you learn how to read a book, somebody is going to want to write one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with traits - play God, some would say.

Gregory Benford

#23. Usually I write the songs at home and then I bring them in to the band; when we play them as a band, that's kinda how we figure out the feel of how they're going to be presented on the record or live.

Britt Daniel

#24. But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?
Yes ... the same age you will be if you don't.

Julia Cameron

#25. When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go.

Sam Shepard

#26. A friend and I started a band together. I am kind of learning how to play instruments. We write stuff over Skype or e-mail. I send one part and he writes another.

Reece Thompson

#27. Learn how to program and play lots of games. If you find yourself capable of writing a game, someday you'll be capable of writing a really good game. My dad's a writer, and when you ask him how to learn to write, he says, "write." So basically, do it and keep doing it until you get good.

Fred Haslam

#28. I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.

Sam Shepard

#29. As a writer, I marinate, speculate, and hibernate.

Trisha Sugarek

#30. The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.

Aaron Sorkin

#31. In an age of incompetence, I've been able to last in this crazy business. I actually know how to play my ax and write a song. That's my job.

Billy Joel

#32. I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play ... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.

Kim Gordon

#33. I think when I first started discovering I could write songs, I was so naive. And it was after I got broken up with and had my heart sliced up into a bunch of little pieces that I was like, "I'm going to say this." I didn't even know how to play guitar.

Gwen Stefani

#34. When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions
that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

Edward Albee

#35. It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

Neil LaBute

#36. I keep a journal, and every day I write down one great play that I had that day. I don't write down any negatives.

Heather O'Reilly

#37. Man has the right ... to play as he will ... to think what he will: to speak what he will: to write what he will: to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will: to dress as he will.

Aleister Crowley

#38. I felt no need to write a German-bashing play.

Israel Horovitz

#39. I write my songs and just play them, so there are not a whole lot of fireworks. As long as the music comes first, it's OK to have some fireworks. But not the other way around.

Kacey Musgraves

#40. Most of my recent plays were written in the railway train between Hatfield and Kings Cross. I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.

George Bernard Shaw

#41. Music, for me, is completely self-indulgent. I write it, I play the instruments, I arrange it, I produce it. It's all about me - as it should be.

Lenny Kravitz

#42. Since my father is a musician as well, he taught me growing up that if you can play jazz, you can learn all instruments and write on them. He wanted me to be a songwriter that can do anything in any genre. I'm all about doing every genre.

Meghan Trainor

#43. I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.

Jim Sturgess

#44. Adam Berenson knows how to compose, organize an ensemble, do musical research, play solo and trio piano, write for musical journals, and enlist others to his cause. A very fine musician.

Paul Bley

#45. I didn't want to play these people any more songs and have them say that they weren't good enough. So my response was to just not be able to write anymore. I know that's not the healthiest of responses.

Aimee Mann

#46. 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.

David Hare

#47. I love thinking of movie stars who could play the characters in the books I write. I think Charlize Theron would make a lovely Marie Antoinette.

Kathryn Lasky

#48. I'm still learning so much with every play I write. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts. I think you have to be ruthless.

Stephen Karam

#49. People have said to me, You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument. But I've got 10 gold records.

Sonny Bono

#50. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#51. I do play all the characters, when I write them, one after another. If they actually had to film me, the only one I could play would be Samwell Tarly or Hot Pie.

George R R Martin

#52. 'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.

Terrence McNally

#53. The two together are a really great combo: the family life and then being able to go play some shows and write.

Vonda Shepard

#54. I go to restaurants and the groups always play "Yesterday." I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he played us "Yesterday." He couldn't understand that I didn't write the song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing "I Am The Walrus.

John Lennon

#55. I want to play music when I want, write a song if I want or watch a baseball game if I want.

John Lee Hooker

#56. I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I'm blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

Anthony Hopkins

#57. If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.

A.A. Milne

#58. I wrote music. I was in a hardcore band when I was 14, and I wasn't good enough to play anyone else's songs, so I had to write my own.

Dito Montiel

#59. I write a lot of stuff, and some of it I don't even present to Judas Priest. But having said that, my first love is to play Judas Priest music.

Glenn Tipton

#60. When I was 5, I started taking singing lessons, and then, after 'School of Rock,' I started taking guitar lessons. I would always write songs and play them for my friends, and I would play my guitar on the set a lot.

Miranda Cosgrove

#61. Some people always have to be doing battle with someone, sometimes even with themselves, battling with their own lives. So they begin to create a kind of play in their head, and they write the script based on their frustrations. ==========

Anonymous

#62. It's sort of pathetic to just play other people's songs all the time, even if you don't feel like you have the chops to write good music.

A.D. Aliwat

#63. When I write in the studio, I tend to gravitate toward the ability to play really loud, aggressive, post-punk stuff, with big, heavy guitars and a big rock drum sound.

Tom DeLonge

#64. I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I'm going along.

Christopher Durang

#65. I write songs all the time in my room. I play them for my friends and family.

Miranda Cosgrove

#66. I never write a play with an eye to film.

Neil Simon

#67. When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.

Charlie Haden

#68. I play all my own instruments. I write my own material. And I do not lip-synch. I sing live.

Kaci Brown