Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Racists are deficient as human beings.
The best of any artist is in their art.
There's no place more theatrical than history.
I'm dancing to the music of the madness inside me.
I like to knock down walls and allow others to enter.
If I hadn't told stories, I would've been a historian.
God created black people and black people created style.
AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.
Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are.
The only rule of a musical is that it must maintain its buoyancy.
Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess!
I want to create a theater that looks, feels, and smells like America.
It's easier to be cynical and edgy and tough rather than overly emotional.
1985 - That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.
My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.
I feel like I'm edgy and I'm funny and I got this bite, this outrageousness.
When 'The Normal Heart' first appeared, the sense of urgency was so important.
I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.
With actors, I have very close, intense working relationships with actors in theater.
Certain events make people come out of their little boxes and become part of the whole.
Certain things come to me; I just become intrigued by them and want to live inside them.
If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn't be locked out of the room.
The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.
I've always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other.
There is a strange kind of parental pride when 'Topdog' ends up on Broadway, or 'Elaine Stritch.'
Producing has empowered me as an artist in a specific way. It's forced a certain kind of maturity.
'You Gotta Have Heart' is one of the most ridiculously perfect, amazing musical comedy songs ever.
I think we all have a primal desire to know as much as we can to find out about where we come from.
I'm the most democratic fascist you'll ever meet. I listen to everybody, and then I make a decision.
A lot of directors tend to manipulate actors' vulnerability to get what they want, and that can work.
To me, 'Show Boat' was the first American musical, the first to have the real texture of this country.
Doing any kind of culture in America in which you are not trying to affirm a European aesthetic is war.
I'm convinced whenever something opens on Broadway, it's a miracle. It's a miracle that people survived.
I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.
Our lives are connected in ways we can't imagine. They're connected even before we know they're connected.
In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.
When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.
On different projects, different pieces of you will show up. Sometimes it's surprising which piece shows up.
If you love theatre, do theatre wherever you can, because theatre is theatre, and you can experience it anywhere.
The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.
Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.
When I was on dialysis, I willed myself to do 'On the Town.' It accesses my most childlike, joyful love of theater.
Commercial theater, in its agenda to appeal to everybody, is often at the expense of the unique vision of the artist.
Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I'm just intrigued by that phenomenon.
You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.
Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.
I absolutely love working on musicals, but anytime I finish a project, I want to move on to something completely different.
Surviving failure is one thing. Surviving success is... is challenging, with the consequences and what you lose along the way.
I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.'
I'm interested in exploring how an individual maintains a sense of power in a world that tends to make individuals feel powerless.