Top 39 Quotes About Playwriting: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Playwriting

#1. One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.

Simon McBurney

#2. This was the house that Paula had taken me and two other graduate students to years earlier. She had told us to go out on the deck, look at the view of the Atlantic Ocean, and say to ourselves, This is what playwriting can buy. Now,

Sarah Ruhl

#3. I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft.

David Ives

#4. Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

T. S. Eliot

#5. I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

Tom Stoppard

#6. I majored in screenwriting and playwriting in school - and wanted to make films as a career. But when I directed my first short in college - which was called 'Extras' - I lost thousands of dollars and made an unsatisfying and incomplete film.

Mike Birbiglia

#7. Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.

Peter Shaffer

#8. For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

Sam Shepard

#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

#10. There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

Tony Kushner

#11. Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.

Billy Collins

#12. Feydeau's one rule of playwriting:
Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B.
Knock Knock.
Enter Character B.

John Guare

#13. My mother was working on her college degree throughout my childhood, and being the youngest in the family, that meant being dragged to a lot of her classes. She majored in playwriting, so I was exposed to theatre from a very young age, and it was just the most magical world to me.

Valorie Curry

#14. It's no use to go and take courses in playwriting any more than it's much use taking courses in acting. Better play to a bad matinee in Hull - it will teach you much more than a year of careful instruction. Come to think of it, I never did play to a good matinee in Hull ...

Noel Coward

#15. When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.

Wallace Shawn

#16. Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.

Arthur Miller

#17. Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.

Moss Hart

#18. Playwriting is all about empathy, getting inside the head of someone who is not you, to think like they think without judging them.

Donald Margulies

#19. I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.

Zoe Kazan

#20. I think of myself more as a filmmaker or as a film person than as strictly just a writer. I don't come out of playwriting or anything like that.

Peter Gould

#21. Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting.

Jez Butterworth

#22. Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process.

Paula Vogel

#23. I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

Liev Schreiber

#24. Act One: Get your hero up a tree. Act Two: Throw rocks at him. Act Three: Get him down out of the tree. - attributed to George Abbott, on playwriting

Darrell Fusaro

#25. I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

Orson Scott Card

#26. I like playwriting because it's rooted in a single location with actors standing talking to each other.

Amanda Peet

#27. I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.

Gia Coppola

#28. But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don't have to be very smart.

Beth Henley

#29. I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

Zoe Kazan

#30. My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.

August Wilson

#31. How many plays have been written in France?' Candide asked the abbe.
'Five or six thousand.'
'That's a lot,' said Candide. 'How many of them are good?'
'Fifteen or sixteen,' replied the abbe.
'That's a lot,' said Martin.

Voltaire

#32. If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.
But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

Tom Stoppard