Stage is the place of the playwright: you're guided by great actors and directors, but it's the playwright's word on the page that counts.
Abi Morgan
The first job I got was this TV job in this show called 'The Unusuals.' Then I did a play called 'Slipping,' and at the same time I was rehearsing another play at Playwrights Horizons, and that kind of snowballed into a bunch of plays.
Adam Driver
I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn't intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, 'Well if I'm going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct.'
Adam Rapp
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.
I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.
Dodger Stadium is not an antique. It's not Frank Lloyd Wright. It's a nice place to play baseball, but there are far better.
Alan Casden
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
Alex Cox
In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have... But I never did write a play.
Alice McDermott
Among all the marvels of modern invention, that with which I am most concerned is, of course, air transportation. Flying is perhaps the most dramatic of recent scientific attainment. In the brief span of thirty-odd years, the world has seen an inventor's dream first materialized by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk become an everyday actuality.
Amelia Earhart
I've always loved Don Cheadle and Jeffery Wright and even Sam Jackson.
Andre Royo
In 2004, we had a great year, with Samit Patel, Liam Plunkett, Tim Bresnan, Luke Wright, Alistair Cook. Some groups are not quite as strong.
Andy Pick
I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'
Ann-Marie MacDonald
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.
Anna D. Shapiro
One of the great things that playwright A.R. Gurney does in 'Sylvia' is he gives language to the emotional gestures and energy that our dogs give to us when they're communicating.
Annaleigh Ashford
My grandfather Frank Lloyd Wright wore a red sash on his wedding night. That is glamour!
Anne Baxter
I loved Stephen Wright, and I loved Mitch Hedberg, but they seemed like geniuses you could never emulate. You'd just be ripping them off.
Anthony Jeselnik
I enjoy where I am and I don't have a problem with being Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci, Don Cheadle, or Jeffrey Wright. They're not the lead of every movie they're in, but every time you see them they're really good.
Anthony Mackie
And I loved Frank Lloyd Wright. I think he was the greatest man I have ever met in my life.
Anthony Quinn
Well, I called him and I said, Mr. Wright, what can I do? Universal offered me a contract $300 a week. He says take it. You'll never get that money from me.
Everybody wants to identify things about a poet or about a playwright. They want to codify something or put it in terms that can be understood. We want to understand something, because that's how our minds work. We like to understand things, and it's discomfiting if we don't understand things.
Anthony Zerbe
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.
In 1980 I sent a play, 'Jitney,' to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with sixteen playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, too.
The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier.
I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.
In the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright - and you can also see it with Mies - they make new ground by raising the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright did it so beautifully with the Robie House. The roof becomes almost a new ground.
But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
Edward Albee, the premier dark playwright of the American theater, would show up at rehearsal and quote his favorite lines from 'Auntie Mame'. He would stand at the back of the theater, not facing the stage, and sort of conduct the music of his play.
If you are in an Edward Albee play, you say Edward Albee is the greatest playwright of all time... If you're in an Israel Horovitz play, you say Israel Horovitz is the greatest playwright of all time.
I grew up when one of America's greatest black playwrights, August Wilson, was writing about life in Pittsburgh, but I never saw myself in any of his straight-male plays. And then I see 'Angels,' which was so honest and painful, and it had this black drag queen in it, Belize, with a big heart. I finally had a character to relate to.
Where most politicians would have abandoned a supporter like Jeremiah Wright and the community he served, Obama, while strongly criticizing him, did not throw his friend overboard.
I'm not a playwright.
The reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.
If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.
When I received my first paycheck from my now known day job, I spent it on a period Craftsman chair and a Frank Lloyd Wright-wannabe lamp. With my second paycheck, I bought a stereo.
The first theater subscription I ever bought was the August Wilson season at Signature. I remember thinking a whole season to one playwright was a great way for a master to do a victory lap.
I seem to belong to a boom moment of playwrights, and I'm always curious about how we all got here and what comes next.
I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.
Family dramas are tough, as a playwright. Most stories are about characters going on a trip or a new character coming to town, because that's how you learn information about them. But with family, they all know each other already. There's years of history in every interaction.
People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.
There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.
There's a historical milestone in the fact that our Apollo 11 landing on the moon took place a mere 66 years after the Wright Brothers' first flight.
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
I was lucky enough to be a child during the renaissance of Australian children's literature, when people like Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Lilith Norman and Wrightson were pumping out hugely inspiring stuff.
The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.
I did invent the idea of using lucid dreaming to treat sleep disorders, but I was influenced by many real-life researchers - from forefathers like Freud and Jung to Stephen Laberge and Rosalind Cartwright, who explore lucid dreaming and parasomnias.
Jay Wright is class personified. He wins with class, loses with dignity when he does, which is not often.
