Richard Foreman Quotes

#1. It's true, I don't like the real world.

Richard Foreman

#2. Understand
it ALWAYS makes sense. Sense can't be avoided. If it first seems to be non-sense, wait: roots will reveal themselves.

Richard Foreman

#3. You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

Richard Foreman

#4. My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

Richard Foreman

#5. I'm there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don't like it, I'm very unhappy, but I can't do anything about that.

Richard Foreman

#6. I've been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky.

Richard Foreman

#7. The first practice is the practice of undiscriminating virtue: take care of those who are deserving; also, and equally, take care of those who are not. When you extend your virtue in all directions without discriminating, you feet are firmly planted on the path that returns to the Tao.

Laozi

#8. As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

Richard Foreman

#9. The success and the failure are not my concern, but His.

Joseph Barber Lightfoot

#10. So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

Richard Foreman

#11. I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not ... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.

Richard Foreman

#12. Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.

Richard Foreman

#13. There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

Richard Foreman

#14. What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

Richard Foreman

#15. Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again.

Richard Foreman

#16. If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit.

Richard Foreman

#17. In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

Louise Bogan

#18. I yearned for everything long gone.

Osamu Dazai

#19. A song will keep going round in my brain and keep me awake.

Norah Jones

#20. I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.

Richard Foreman

#21. From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything.

Richard Foreman

#22. I bounce off four walls, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because I only sleep those four hours a day.

Casper Van Dien

#23. Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

Richard Foreman

#24. When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

Desmond Tutu

#25. A psychology degree doesn't get you very far.

Jerry Bruckheimer

#26. Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.

Richard Foreman

#27. I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.

Richard Foreman

#28. One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

Richard Foreman

#29. I respect the people who buy my records and come to my concerts. It's only fair that I always try to give them the very best that's in me. After all, I need them more than they need me.

Andy Gibb

#30. All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.

Richard Foreman

#31. Like garden weeds, conflict always seems to find a way of sprouting up,

Richard Foreman