quotations about playwriting
The stage play is a trial not a deed of violence. The soul is opened, like the combination of a safe, by means of a word. You don't require an acetylene torch.
JEAN GIRAUDOUX
Collected Plays of Jean Giradoux
Get into the scene late, get out of the scene early.
DAVID MAMET
The Paris Review, spring 1997
It is Mystery -- the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event -- or accident -- in any life on earth ... [that] I want to realize in the theatre. The solution, if there ever be any, will probably have to be produced in a test tube and turn out to be discouragingly undramatic.
EUGENE O'NEILL
attributed, British and American Plays, 1830-1945
Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Playwriting is an art and a craft while you're doing it, but once you've put a cover on that draft, it becomes a business.
RICHARD TOSCAN
Playwriting Seminars 2.0: A Handbook on the Art and Craft of Dramatic Writing
Quite often I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I'm proved--equally as often--quite wrong.
HAROLD PINTER
The Paris Review, fall 1966
New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect.
PATRICE PAVIS
Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture
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
The Paris Review, autumn 1953
I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.
EDWARD ALBEE
interview, The Believer
In a play, from the beginning, you have to realize that you're preparing something which is going into the hands of other people, unknown at the time you're writing it.
T. S. ELIOT
The Paris Review, Spring-Summer 1959
Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish.
ARTHUR MILLER
"The Shadows of the Gods"
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, except to say: That is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
HAROLD PINTER
Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, 1948-1998
Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.
EDWARD ALBEE
interview with Steve Capra, 1996
One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions.
ANTON CHEKHOV
letter to Maxim Gorky, September 24, 1900
Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
The art of the dramatist is very like the art of the architect. A plot has to be built up just as a house is built--story after story; and no edifice has any chance of standing unless it has a broad foundation and a solid frame.
BRANDER MATTHEWS
The Principles of Playmaking
The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH -- which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied -- prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.
DAVID MAMET
Three Uses of the Knife
I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.
AUGUST WILSON
African American Review, Spring, 2001
Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use. He's the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.
ARTHUR MILLER
Conversations with Arthur Miller