Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My real pleasure is that 4 times a week 1,800 people are standing up and shouting on Broadway for an author who died hundreds of years ago.
Plays by people like Martin McDonagh and Brian Friel attract huge audiences, not because they're Irish, but because they're brilliant plays.
It's a morbid observation, but if every one on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a problem.
There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.
Whenever you do a new interpretation of a great, previous text of any kind, you always look for some kind of immediate significance right now.
I wish theater criticism in this country could be more of a companion piece to the experience than a warning about where not to spend your money.
I am a storyteller, and I grew up with a father who told big-fish stories, so storytelling is very much a part of me. It was a part of my family.
The interviewer always learns something new from the interviewee. It opens up your mind to new ideas and the vast multiplicity of human experience.
The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.
The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved.
Art is violent. To be decisive is violent. ... To place a chair at a partial angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option.
If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.
That, for me, is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do.
Any film I've made, I've only really begun to understand in the cutting room. That's when the story shows itself to you, like a wreck coming out of the sea.
I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.
My father was very funny, so I grew up with humor in the house. And I was always really attracted to comedies on TV. I was always really attracted to comics.
A word does not start as a word – it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictates the need for expression.
Norman Rockwell, the Brueghel of the 20th century bourgeoisie, the Holbein of Jell-O ads and magazine covers; by common assent, the most American artist of all.
Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.
In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.
I tell stories through dance, and I think that's why I'm so attracted to the theatre because even the choreography in theatre moves the plot forward at all times.
I love art and I find myself at the MoMA all the time. Museums are a real refuge for me. I go to a museum for any break that I have, and I'm very inspired by art.
I love wandering. It's liberating to throw away the map and explore uncharted galleries. You'll nearly always stumble into something immensely interesting that way.
I wouldn't call myself religious. I'm spiritual. Everybody's a bit more so as you get older. I'm a cultural Catholic; it's inescapable, but I think I have to believe.
I think theatres will always remain a sacred place where people go for something live and experience things live, which is very different than the experience of film.
I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.
[Victoria Clark] is one of those people who has the rarest combination of gifts. I can put her in any classical play tomorrow because she such an extraordinary actress.
I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or if performances were canceled. It was a fix that I obviously needed.
I'm convinced that theatre is a horrible business. Make this the headline. You have to be on the spot every night as an actor. You are damn lonesome standing out there.
The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.
You are faced with the choice: either my integrity remains intact and this is the work that ends up on the screen, or I have to leave, and I have to be known to have left.
Never ask yourself what you have learned... only ask yourself what are the circumstances which are different from last year. In that way, you can apply last year's lessons.
In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.
People grow and change and develop through their experiences, so ultimately you have to go with what's in the room - the feeling you get from them and what the camera picks up.
I never seek controversy or foresee it for my pictures. I take a personal stand, and perhaps because my films are on contemporary subjects, people do not share my point of view.
I just feel like, for whatever reason, female playwrights don't really ask me to do their plays. Nothing would make me happier than finding the sisterhood, but I can't make them.
I had spent time in New York, where I loved the idea that theater could be done up in tiny little rooms rather than for lots of money on a big stage, and be tied to ordinary life.
What's great about [Guettel] is his very distinct voice as a composer. And that distinct voice is something worth cherishing and expressing so we just didn't want to screw that up.
I was born in Ballaghadreen, but I grew up in Galway, and when I went to the University College of Galway, I became involved in the drama society there and started directing plays.
I imagine that all Americans have a unique relationship in their individual present to their collective past and how that relationship might shape their identities and experiences.
I think today there are too many directors taking themselves seriously; the only one capable of saying anything really new and interesting is Luis Bunuel. He's a very great director.
Music has always been a part of my spiritual seeking, from the moment that Handel's 'Messiah' gave me the experience when I was so young, and music has meant so much to me since then.
Even when I rehearse down in the bowels of the Metropolitan Opera, you can't help but think why The Phantom of the Opera was inspired by what happens in the bowels of the opera house.
The one thing that never changes in America is that the white straight male is born with a promise. Women are not promised very much, and we embody our disappointment from the beginning.
The prince in The Leopard was a very complex character - at times autocratic, rude, strong - at times romantic, good, understanding - and sometimes even stupid, and above all, mysterious.
Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.
I know a lot of choreographers prefer to do abstract dance and not be bothered with a story, but even when I'm asked to do classical ballet or a modern piece, I still want to tell a story.
In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.
The prince in 'The Leopard' was a very complex character - at times autocratic, rude, strong - at times romantic, good, understanding - and sometimes even stupid, and above all, mysterious.
As far as Irish writers being great, I think the fact that there have been two languages in Ireland for a very long time; there has obviously been a shared energy between those two languages.