Marsha Norman Quotes

#1. The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

Marsha Norman

#2. Jesus was a suicide, if you ask me.

Marsha Norman

#3. After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as 'night, Mother.'

Marsha Norman

#4. Write about the thing that frightens you most.

Marsha Norman

#5. I'm who I was waiting for. I didn't make it.

Marsha Norman

#6. 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.

Marsha Norman

#7. I never said I knew much. How was I supposed to learn anything living out here? I didn't know enough to do half the things I did in my life. Things happen. You do what you can about them and you see what happens next.

Marsha Norman

#8. There is no point in trying to remember your dreams ... There is only the unspeakable joy of eavesdropping on your spirit, catching tiny glimpses of its independent life, resting for a moment in its wisdom, puzzling, laughing sometimes, over what it's up to, what it makes of you.

Marsha Norman

#9. There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets.

Marsha Norman

#10. I feel that I speak the musical language.

Marsha Norman

#11. We are not afraid to look under the bed, or to wash the sheets; we know that life is messy. We know that somebody has to clean it up, and that only if it is cleaned up can we hope to start over, and get better.

Marsha Norman

#12. How could I love him, Jessie. I didn't have a thing he wanted.

Marsha Norman

#13. I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.

Marsha Norman

#14. When 'night, Mother' opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.

Marsha Norman

#15. Dreams are illustrations ... from the book your soul is writing about you.

Marsha Norman

#16. Family is just accident, Jessie. It's nothing personal, hon. They don't mean to get on your nerves. They don't even mean to be your family, they just are.

Marsha Norman

#17. Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write.

Marsha Norman

#18. Why do you have to know so much about things, Jessie? There's just not that much to things that I could ever see.

Marsha Norman

#19. People listen to music with cavemen ears: Is it a bird song or the call of a lion? The audience at a musical is dancing in their hearts.

Marsha Norman

#20. What I hope to do is create a play that investigates the ongoing violence toward women and children in the world, and searches for some kind of answer to the question, 'What Can We Do?'

Marsha Norman

#21. When you fight something long enough, it becomes a center pole right in your life and you count on it to be there to fight with.

Marsha Norman

#22. Think of a musical as a string of pearls. If you don't have a string, you can't put the pearls around your neck.

Marsha Norman

#23. He felt sorry for me. He wanted a plain country woman and that's what he married, and then he held it against me the rest of my life like I was supposed to change and surprise him somehow.

Marsha Norman

#24. If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright.

Marsha Norman

#25. I have had an inordinate and painful concern for the audience in my writing career.

Marsha Norman

#26. People do think that if they avoid the truth, it might change to something better before they have to hear it.

Marsha Norman

#27. On the whole the American theater, dominated by men, does not perceive women fighting for their lives as a central issue.

Marsha Norman

#28. How can I get up everyday knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive and I couldn't do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?

Marsha Norman

#29. Knowing is the most profound kind of love, giving someone the gift of knowledge about yourself.

Marsha Norman

#30. I only told you about it because I thought I might get a laugh out of you for once even if it wasn't the truth, Jessie. Things don't have to be true to talk about 'em, you know.

Marsha Norman

#31. At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.

Marsha Norman

#32. During the day, our souls gather their ... impressions of us, how our lives feel ... Our spirits collect these impressions, keep them together, like wisps of smoke in a bag. Then, when we're asleep, our brains open up these bags of smoke ... and take a look.

Marsha Norman

#33. What's so good about a heaven where, one of these days, you're going to get your embarrassing old body back?

Marsha Norman

#34. There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it.

Marsha Norman

#35. I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.

Marsha Norman

#36. Success is always something that you have to recover from.

Marsha Norman

#37. If someone wants to say 'I love you' in a straight play, they say it, and then it's the other person's turn to talk. But in a song, you can sing about it for another three minutes. The musical form has that unique opportunity to express at length what joy really feels like.

Marsha Norman

#38. It was his idea to go horseback riding that day. It was his idea I could do anything if I just made up my mind to. I fell off the horse because I didn't know how to hold on. Cecil left for pretty much the same reason.

Marsha Norman

#39. Art is how a culture records its life, how it poses questions for the next generation and how it will be remembered.

Marsha Norman

#40. I hate milk. Coats your throat as bad as okra. Something just downright disgusting about it.

Marsha Norman