Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.
A typical day for me is I'm writing when I'm not directing.
You have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.
You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.
We only have so much time.... Time will kill you it really will.
The rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic and the best idea wins.
I began stealing a lot of ideas from other directors I had worked with.
What I've learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.
Whenever I've been in rehearsals, it's really fun, there's always laughing.
I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.
I've never really felt that I've had the right hair cut, or had the right clothes.
I think I'm a little more daunted by when the machinery of the play is really huge.
I think, for me, when I direct my own work it's just an extension of the authorship.
I dont see a lot of movies that portray the East Village as well as I think they can.
I don't see a lot of movies that portray the East Village as well as I think they can.
I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers.
Sometimes when I'm directing, the stage manager will have a good idea and that's okay with me.
When I'm directing, I'm pretty much not writing, but when I'm not directing I am writing a lot.
When it's just a few scenes and a couple of actors behaving in a room, I feel very confident with that.
I don't like the sort of hierarchical, totalitarian type of room a lot of directors can find themselves in.
I think because my brother was an actor and I just saw how he struggled through, I guess I'm sensitive to it.
It's strange, people have asked me what my schedule is and what is my process like, and I can't even answer it.
I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter.
I don't put big concepts on my work, and it's all often about keeping actors in a room together and not letting them leave.
I find that more and more I'm trying to entertain myself when I'm working, because I know the work's going to go to a horrible place.
Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov's work to modern playwrights', consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.
My work is always more emotional than I am. My characters say things to each other that I get accused of not being able to say to my girlfriend.
When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.
I find auditioning to be a very illusive process, where actors come in with this really big result with no process, so it's a lie already at work.
I would hope that the staffs at juvenile detention centers and reform schools are carefully chosen so that there is a community of support and hope.
I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.
It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.
I've never really felt good at the parties, but I have enough friends now that I feel social, I used to feel very antisocial, but I think the theater helps.
I was a jock in college and high school, but I didn't hang out with the jocks. I was sort of a nerd who didn't look like a nerd. I never really fit into any social set.
I think auditioning can be very reductive and I just hate how actors work really hard and most of them aren't going to get the job, and I hate putting them through that.
I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I've lived here for sixteen years.
My life has been in shambles, like my personal relationships, my laundry, paying bills now I have someone who pays my bills and it's always been a challenge because it overwhelms me.
I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort-of narrative and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.
I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort of narrative, and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.
When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.
I saw 'Six Degrees of Separation' because my brother was in it. It was a watershed experience. It was theatrical and scary, and New York functioned like a character. John Guare became a hero for me.
There was a kind of physical anarchy that dominated most of my younger life. I was always too skinny, not hairy enough, my voice jumped around. It was a thing that drove me away from towel lines in gym class.
I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive, and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry.
I have to be entertained by what I'm writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.
It's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life.
The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train - either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work?
I feel that I'd rather know an actors' work, or have an instinct about them and sit down and have coffee with them, or I'll see them in something and I'll see if I can get along with them in some way, shape, or form.
I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than where they put your heart. Somewhere so deep inside that the doctors can't find it with all their machines and microcameras.
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.
When I came to New York, I was really awkward. I went to military academy for high school, so I didn't have the socialization that most kids do. When I got here, I was five years behind everybody. Talking to women was weird for me.