Karam Quotes

#1. Everyone is Annawadi talks like this- oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, "What a navigator I am!" And then the wind blows you east. -ABDUL'S FATHER, KARAM HUSAIN

Katherine Boo

#2. As playwrights, as poets, we have to look to ourselves, listen to our guts for the final answers about what changes to make. Everyone has advice about how to end your play differently. And it's not about right or wrong. At the end of the day, it's your baby and you know what's best.

Stephen Karam

#3. You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.

Leo Tolstoy

#4. Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.

Stephen Karam

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

Stephen Karam

#6. No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth.

Anton Walbrook

#7. I do think it's fascinating to see a play where everybody's sort of, in various ways, uprooted, and you see the older generation, the parents, whose faith has been something concrete that has guided them through a specific set of hurdles and circumstances.

Stephen Karam

#8. Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life.

George MacDonald

#9. I'm always very self-conscious and assume the way faith or religion might come up in my plays will seem very harsh to people of faith, or who are currently practicing.

Stephen Karam

#10. In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's heart sank.

Stephen Karam

#11. where madness and charm coexist, wine is never far away.

Michael Karam

#12. If you won't be my friend, you'll regret being my enemy.

Marie Rutkoski

#13. There is a woman at the beginning of all great things.

Alphonse De Lamartine

#14. Priests are very interested in theater in New York! It's this lovely reminder that priests are just people, too, who need to be entertained.

Stephen Karam

#15. The most important part about playing shows and touring, is connecting with fans. At the end of the day it's not really a band and fans, we're all just human beings.

Hayley Williams

#16. Put a gun in a young man's hands and call him a soldier. Doesn't make him a killer. Sew a stripe on his arm, a ribbon on his chest. Doesn't make him soulless.

Rio Youers

#17. So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families.

Stephen Karam

#18. We need to mock false gods publicly.

Robert Barron

#19. I know how much respect I have for people of all different faiths, but especially for my family, who are the most important people in my life, and who are still practicing, and deeply religious.

Stephen Karam

#20. It's not enough to wish, dream, hope. Even children know this. We must set sail into the sea of uncertainty. We must meet fear face-to-face. We must take our dreams as maps for a greater journey. Dreams, to come true, need a good story. So go live one.

Vironika Tugaleva

#21. It was impossible not to smile back-Nick radiated light.

Michelle Madow

#22. There's this unspoken history that exists between any mother and daughter, no matter how deep and loving the bond is, twenty-five years of being raised by someone, there's a kind of deep history which means that there are shortcuts to getting on each other's nerves.

Stephen Karam

#23. The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.

Stephen Karam

#24. I dont get that
people going to war over religion. I dont know, I could see going to war over justice or democracy or even revenge. But if youre going to war over religion, now youre just killing people in an argument over who has the better imaginary friend.

Richard Jeni

#25. Hey, it's your chance... climb the balcony... give me a plastic rose... and we'll pretend that we're actually beautiful people.

Stephen Karam

#26. 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