Top 100 Quotes About Writing Plays
#1. 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
#2. I've been writing plays since the third grade. The biggest difference now is that professionals act in them rather than eight year olds ... and the language is a bit more "colorful".
Colette Freedman
#3. I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.
Lena Dunham
#4. I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
Taiye Selasi
#5. By the time I started writing plays, Broadway was never an expectation, so it's never been central.
Richard Greenberg
#6. Sophocles was a general: a warrior writing plays about military situations.
Adam Driver
#7. The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out,
Arthur Miller
#8. I'd always loved the theater, and I began by writing plays. I work in the theater a lot in the UK, and I've worked in the theater out here quite a bit. Everything else - the films - followed as a consequence of that.
Lucinda Coxon
#9. I always wanted to be an independent maverick, writing plays and putting them on myself.
Christian McKay
#10. I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain.
Sefi Atta
#11. I've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
Sam Shepard
#12. I got really into writing plays. I did that for years and years and got some produced and didn't like it as much when I wasn't able to control it.
Jake M. Johnson
#13. All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
Yukio Mishima
#14. I had stopped writing plays set in villages because they were not relevant to my experiences and I knew my English classmates wouldn't appreciate them.
Sefi Atta
#15. Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.
Wole Soyinka
#16. For me, writing plays is far more an act of the mind than of the emotions. It's a very different kind of impulse than fiction writing.
Jim Grimsley
#17. So I find the fascination, the love, the incredible skill and everything to do with acting, writing plays, and doing them, just darling. Lovely. I love actors.
Patrick Macnee
#18. When you're writing plays, it's possible to believe you don't have any real world skill. When you're adapting, it is really all about the mechanics, so you feel closer to, I don't know, an accountant or someone who has a body of information. It's not all about temperament.
Richard Greenberg
#19. I think he [Vaclav Havel] felt that he could speak more truth, in a way, through writing plays.
Judy Woodruff
#20. 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
#21. I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.
Berlie Doherty
#22. 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
#23. I started writing plays, but the fact that plays don't last forever was too much for me to bear.
Lena Dunham
#24. When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
Gabrielle Zevin
#25. The story of Harold Fry and his unlikely pilgrimage began as an afternoon play for radio. For many years, I have been writing plays and adapting novels for 'Woman's Hour' and the 'Classic' series. So this was originally a three-hander play, broadcast one sunny afternoon on BBC Radio 4.
Rachel Joyce
#26. I was born in Philadelphia, and I've tried to escape that city all my life. I end up writing plays that force me back to Philadelphia, at least psychologically if not physically.
Lyle Kessler
#27. So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.
Richard Foreman
#28. I started writing plays in around 1967, and at a certain point, I thought, 'I'm writing plays, I should learn about acting and what it is.' So I went to the HB Studio in New York, and I was there for about nine months.
Wallace Shawn
#29. It's very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.
Laura Wade
#30. Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, "Is there a play from Shaw this morning?" and when she says, "No," he will say, "Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish." And that's your chance, my boy.
George Bernard Shaw
#31. What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.
George Bernard Shaw
#32. Everyone knows how creative the Scots are.
They're always sculpting, painting, singing songs, & writing plays.
They invented television, the telephone, & deep-fried Mars bars.
David Baillie
#33. I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.
Rodman Philbrick
#34. I do choose to write for a living - in addition to writing plays. I no longer write sitcoms, and I no longer feel shame.
Lisa Loomer
#35. Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.
Annie Baker
#36. I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television.
Terry Teachout
#37. 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
#38. In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.
Tom Stoppard
#39. Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.
Tom Stoppard
#40. Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.
Stephen Karam
#41. One of the things about what ... I do - writing plays - is that a poll is not taken before you say, Well, I'm going to write this because I think that you're going to like this and therefore you'll buy a ticket for this.
Wendy Wasserstein
#42. I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.
Jason Katims
#43. I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.
Jesse Eisenberg
#44. I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.
Tom Stoppard
#45. I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them.
Timothy Dalton
#46. One-act [plays] are not strikingly remunerative, but, on the other hand, the veriest dullard could not spend more than a week in writing one.
Arnold Bennett
#47. 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
#48. As much as you don't want to say you are a vengeful person, when someone drags your name through the mud and plays press games and puts things out there like that, you are kind of like, alright. US Weekly will be gone next week, the songs I am writing won't.
Kid Rock
#49. Although we are being presented in Carnegie Hall, we have to furnish a budget for our guest stars, and for the music writing - which is a huge budget in any orchestra that plays popular music.
Skitch Henderson
#50. In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
Russell Baker
#51. My dad, who plays guitar and piano and was in cover bands, along with my older brother, Matt, taught me guitar and stuff. I started writing acoustic songs and playing by myself in 7th grade.
Conor Oberst
#52. The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history - the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking.
Megan Smith
#53. 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
#54. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
Wole Soyinka
#56. I don't think I'll ever stop writing. I write almost every day. I'd write plays even if they were never done again. You're at the mercy of whatever talent you have.
Horton Foote
#57. 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
#58. I think a lot of the way that I try to write my stories come from watching my mom write plays and trying to do that.
Jazmine Sullivan
#59. I loved doing school musicals [as a kid], I even started at an early age to write little plays for the school to perform. I was not just keen on that, it was during that time, during the school period then from an early age, that I began to dream about acting.
George Ogilvie
#60. Like a father with his daughter, the writist plays peek-a-boo with the world. His aim is to evoke that sweet smile, the one that says "i remember you. I am glad you are here again".
D.A. Botta
#61. It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.
Helen Oyeyemi
#62. You know, you should start to be in plays and things like that. Write some scripts. If you're an artist and you truly don't believe what you're spittin' then you need to really seriously be an actor then.
Chuck D
#63. If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#64. One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.
Adam Rapp
#65. I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
Patrick White
#66. I can write the stuff and play it myself and have something in my head, but the best feeling is when somebody else plays it and they're hearing something other than what I'm hearing.
Bill Frisell
#67. I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.
Chuck Palahniuk
#69. For all of my class projects, I somehow turned it into a commercial parody or put on plays. My whole thing was seeing things from a big picture, from beginning to middle to end: making a costume, doing voices, writing a script, making it all happen.
Noel Wells
#70. Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Patrick White
#71. If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.
August Wilson
#72. Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
Gunter Grass
#73. Writing a screen play: One page of an average screen play equals about one minute of screen time. Therefore, the script for a typical feature film should be about 100 pages long. In fact, many studios and producers won't look at screen plays that are much longer.
John Griesemer
#74. I think from my earliest childhood, I liked to tell stories, put on plays and write things. It's funny to think of it as an "artistic bug" because I didn't necessarily want to be an artist. It's just who I was and how I communicate.
Zoe Kazan
#75. So many American plays are about family. When you're in the first part of your life, you write about family a lot. I find with my absurdist plays that I was actually writing about my family, but so disguised I didn't realize it myself.
Christopher Durang
#76. You get attached to the way you write, and I'm attached to notebooks. That's where I really write the plays. Just two or three pages at a time, then I transfer to the typewriter and rewrite while I type.
Neil Simon
#77. In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.
Sam Shepard
#78. I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.
Graham Greene
#79. I made use of the college library by borrowing books other than scientific books, such as all of the plays by George Bernard Shaw, the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The college library helped me to develop a broader aspect on life.
Linus Pauling
#80. Suddenly I was writing a lot of screenplays, and I was no long in New York, so I stopped acting in plays, and it just became too tricky to find a part to play, either in a play or a film that coincided with my schedule writing and or directing.
Michael Cristofer
#81. Revision plays a very large role in writing. Sometimes it seems to be all revision. And the longer I write, the more I revise-until it is completely right.
Ellen Hunnicutt
#82. I've been pretty well treated by the critics, but the critics who didn't like my comedies hated them with an unbridled passion, and then I would see these same people writing very respectfully about ordinary naturalistic plays.
David Lindsay-Abaire
#83. As a kid I was always writing and directing plays in my basement with my neighborhood cronies. But please don't get me wrong, I have zero regrets when it comes to the acting stuff. I think it's made me a better director.
Coley Sohn
#84. The French write plays and paint as naturally as we play jazz - it's just a national gift.
Alice B. Toklas
#85. I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.
Peter Shaffer
#86. In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.
Wallace Shawn
#87. I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'
Tony Kushner
#88. I also write plays, so I understand the writers mind, and how obsessed you can get writing.
Jeff Daniels
#89. I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I'm in a good mood, but I don't really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year.
Wallace Shawn
#90. As a writer, I marinate, speculate, and hibernate.
Trisha Sugarek
#91. 'Now I've tasted chocolate I'm not going back'. That's a great line. That's not me, that's all the writing. I mean it's like it doesn't matter who plays it, it's a great role. It's such a funny, tongue in cheek kind of great role.
Amanda Bynes
#92. I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.
Alison McGhee
#93. Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.
A.S. Neill
#95. I started writing and acting in these little plays and then I was discovered by Dustin Hoffman. He got me my first audition for a film he was in, called 'I Heart Huckabees.'
Jonah Hill
#96. In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.
William Irwin Thompson
#97. Exaggeration in every sense is as essential to newspaper writing as it is to the writing of plays: for the point is to make as much as possible of every occurrence. So that all newspaper writers are, for the sake of their trade, alarmists: this is their way of making themselves interesting.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#98. Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.
Tom Stoppard
#99. I always loved theater and acting in plays and directing, writing little plays and directing friends in plays.
Todd Haynes
#100. Since I was a small child, I was always writing either poems or plays ... plays in which I had the starring part.
Francine Pascal
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