Top 33 John Patrick Shanley Quotes
#2. Dear god, whose name i do not know. thank you for my life. i forgot ... how BIG ... thank you. thank you for my life.
John Patrick Shanley
#3. I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in it.
John Patrick Shanley
#4. Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.
John Patrick Shanley
#5. I've done very well in the film business. Whenever I have wanted something, the film business has given it to me. I'm very fortunate. My big problem in life has always been, 'What do I want?'
John Patrick Shanley
#7. I adopted two children, then I got eye disease and five rounds of surgery. I went blind in one eye, then the other eye, and that went on for three or four years. I got very enamored and involved with the theater and did a lot of plays.
John Patrick Shanley
#8. There are people who ... tell you that the light in your heart is a weakness. Don't believe it! It's an old tactic of cruel people to kill kindness in the name of virtue.
John Patrick Shanley
#9. Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.
John Patrick Shanley
#12. You have no right to act on your own! You have taken vows, obedience being one! You answer to us! You have no right to step outside the church!
John Patrick Shanley
#13. You have to live in order to have something to write about - you get caught up in moviemaking and celebrities and money, and it's very intoxicating, but it doesn't give you what you need as a writer. You have to do something else for that.
John Patrick Shanley
#14. When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.
John Patrick Shanley
#15. Back when you were doing plays like 'The Miracle Worker,' you had 20, 25 people in the cast. When you go to make the film, that's not such a stretch. But when you're doing plays like 'Proof,' it's just five people or something in the thing, and it gets to be a really difficult re-conception.
John Patrick Shanley
#16. i don't know what your situation is but i wanted you to know what mine is not just to explain some rude behavior, but because we're on a little boat for a while and... i'm soul sick. and you're going to see that.
John Patrick Shanley
#19. I think that certainty is a closed door, It's the end of the conversation. Doubt is an open door.
John Patrick Shanley
#20. I would say that my parents were intermittently proud of me. They couldn't hang onto it, you know? It would come and go, like the flu.
John Patrick Shanley
#21. I've been writing plays since the seventies and only came to moviemaking when I basically realized that I needed some money to pay the rent. I started to watch films with an eye to figuring out how to write them.
John Patrick Shanley
#22. 'The Miracle Worker' is just such an incredibly powerful play on stage, and is so kinetic, and athletic.
John Patrick Shanley
#23. If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.
John Patrick Shanley
#24. When I finally went to Ireland, I had to go. It was 1993. My father was finally too old to travel alone, and he asked me to take him home. When an old man asks you to take him home, you have to do it.
John Patrick Shanley
#25. Some actors are brilliant in David Mamet, but they would crash and burn in my plays and visa-versa. You either have my music in your body, or you don't.
John Patrick Shanley
#27. When I visited Ireland with my father and heard the people on the farm talking, I couldn't believe the gift of language they had. I felt very untalented.
John Patrick Shanley
#28. The modern economics of the theater is such that we write plays with fewer and fewer characters.
John Patrick Shanley
#29. Women consume, and they must be directed what to consume, or they may identify you as lunch.
John Patrick Shanley
#30. I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.
John Patrick Shanley
#31. It wasn't until I was 35 or 36, when I wrote 'Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,' that I began to get some notoriety, though I only made $5,000.
John Patrick Shanley
#32. People ask me if I believe in things: in God, in astrology, and I say, absolutely! I believe in everything! And I believe in its opposite. Like the positive and negative volts on a battery, you need both for power.
John Patrick Shanley
#33. I'd like to thank everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life and everybody who I ever punched or kissed.
John Patrick Shanley
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