The classic preoccupation of the playwright has been with the family.
- Eric Bentley |
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Central concerns in all drama are certainly the need to be happy, the inability to face reality, the need not to be humiliated, . . .
- John Guare
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Most great drama is about betrayal of one sort or another.
- David Mamet |
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A play is the revelation of a character in crisis.
- Wells Root |
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In every effective play somebody wants something badly. An obstacle comes between this person and the thing that he desires. He struggles with the obstacle and either overcomes it or is overcome by it.
- Brander Matthews |
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Some writers see situation first, and others character, but sooner or later all must come to some story.
- G. P. Baker |
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Your characters must constantly be capable of surprising you, even when you think you know them well.
- Andrew Horton |
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Approach character as a question rather than as a statement.
- Andrew Horton |
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Often a character’s conscious and subconscious goals are in opposition to one another—a woman shutting herself off from the world, when what she really wants is to be loved. Such dichotomies embrace and create complexity in a character.
- Linda Stuart |
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The best scenes are ‘Why are those two people arguing and why are they both right?’
- Norman Lear |
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I know for a fact that the only reason one watches something for more than 15 or 20 minutes is because it has a plot and you’re curious to know what happens next.
- Wallace Shawn |
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By taking our characters and precipitating them, in the very first scene, into the highest pitch of their conflicts we turn to the well-known patterns of classic tragedy, which always seizes upon the action at the very moment it is headed for catastrophe.
- Jean-Paul Sartre |
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Never put two people into the same scene who agree with each other.
- Lew Hunter |
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The audience should feel not uplifted, not superior, not virtuous, but quite the contrary, humbled. Each should be reminded of his own sweet and sour humanity. There should resonate within the audience a sense that situations depicted obtain also for their lives.
- Richard Walter |
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One of the greatest difficulties for the beginning dramatist, I have found, is in creating enough complications—the play tends to move in too direct a line to its outcome.
- Kenneth Rowe Thorpe |
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When we are dying to know what is coming next, we sit still and pay attention. When we aren’t, we don’t—we would rather do almost anything than sit still. Inadequate tension ruins more productions than any other single problem.
- David Ball |
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Like everything else in good art, the writing of good dialog involves selecting what is significant and giving it order. The characters of drama are more articulate and self-revealing than people in life.
- Kenneth Rowe Thorpe |
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If the scene is about what the scene is about, it’s dead. Or if two characters say ‘I love you and mean it, the scene is over. A story must have subtext.
- Linda Stuart
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If you want to send a message, use Western Union.
- D. W. Griffith |
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Theme is the result, look for it last.
- David Ball |
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The purpose of creative expression is not to answer questions but to ask them.
- Richard Walter
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Your play should either entertain, question, or challenge, and at best, do all three.
- Janet Neipris |
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Doubtless an author’s politics must be one element, and even an important one, in the germination of his art, but if it is art he has created, it must by definition bend itself to his observation, rather than to his opinions or even his hopes.
- Arther Miller |
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Really, you don’t know what the plays are about until you have written them. They will tell you what they’re about.
- Christopher Hampton |
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I’m not suggesting that the theater should be deliberately provocative, but if it’s not provoking someone, then it’s probably not doing its job, which is to rearrange consciousness.
- Robert Brustein |
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All bad art is sincere.
- Oscar Wilde |
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Busy yourself with something more interesting and less exciting.
- Konstantin Stanislavsky |
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For myself, it has never been possible to generate the energy to write and complete a play if I know in advance everything it signifies and all that it will contain. The very impulse to write, I think, springs from an inner chaos crying for order, for meaning, and that meaning must be discovered in the process of writing.
- Arthur Miller |
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When I start a play, beyond an entirely general pattern, I have little or no idea what will become of my characters individually at the end. I generally follow their progress with a more or less benign interest and hope that the staging and construction will be taken care of by some divine subconscious automatic pilot.
- Alan Ayckbourne |
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Not one word has ever written itself.
- Arthur Plotnik |
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You can rewrite a play for the rest of your life, but for that first draft, you put the pedal to the metal. I don’t write plays in 48 hours any more, but I write in two or three weeks. I need that momentum.
- Paula Vogel |
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Don’t get it right, get it written.
- James Thurber |
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Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.
- Konstantin Stanislavsky |
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I went to a Picasso exhibit, and there were some preliminary sketches that he made for one of his famous paintings. They started with a complete drawing of a woman, and each of the succeeding 200 drawings subtracted elements of this person until she finally is represented by just a few essential lines.
- Jeremy Whelan |
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Artists who do not go forward go backward.
- Konstantin Stanislavsky |
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Plays aren’t written, they are rewritten.
- Unknown |
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A large part of the technique of playwriting is to leave a lot out.
- David Mamet |
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Quotes 
