Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction. "

Related Quotes:

" My back went out and I gained 40 pounds while sweating over 'Perestroika.' It was incredibly hard, the hardest thing I had to do before the screenplay to 'Lincoln.' "

" Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and, if I'm upset, I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great. "

" Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies. "

" I go into any movie that's historical fiction thinking, 'OK, I'm here to watch a work of art, something delivering a series of opinions, and if it's a good work of art, these opinions become so deeply embedded in complexity and richness that I won't even be bothered by the opinions. I'll make my own mind up.' "

" Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution. "

" I feel there's a power in theatre, but it's an indirect power. It's like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can't afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about. "

" You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe. "

" I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing. "

" The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets. "

" In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications. "

" The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism,' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist. "

" I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book. "

" When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill. "

" You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of. "

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

Irresponsibility

" The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate. "

" The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original. "

" The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we've become people like Woody Allen - thinkers and talkers and drafters of law. "

" The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches. "

" But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud. "

" I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities. "

" I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man. "

" As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people. "

" As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice. "

" When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together. "

" Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself, 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes, then it's historical. Then ask, 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes, then it's history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it's historical drama. "

" The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories. "

" You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do. "

" But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic. "

" If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie. "