Theatre is a living, breathing artform. It is a body with a skeletal structure, a brain, and a beating heart. Playwrights provide the lifeblood to this body with their words, while the directors and characters and designers carry cells to the extremities. They and the audience together make this collective consciousness, if even for a short time on life’s stage.
Here are some quotes to inspire your work.
The Magic and Purpose of The Theatre
- The word theater itself comes from the Greeks—it means “the seeing place.” It’s the place where people come to see a spiritual and social X‑ray of their time. The theater was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation. — Stella Adler, Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights
- All action in the theatre must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent and real. … “If” acts as a lever to lift us out of the world of actuality into the realm of imagination. — Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares
- The word ‘theatre’ was a verb before it was a noun – an act, then a place. That means you must make the gesture, the effort, the real effort to communicate with another being. — Martha Graham, I Am a Dancer
- Suit the action to the word, the word to the action … the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. — William Shakespeare, Hamlet
(In other words, the purpose of theatre is to hold a mirror up to human nature.) - Art, it is said, is not a mirror but a hammer. It does not reflect; it shapes. But at present, even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror … The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to ‘picture’ life. — Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
- The noblest kind of beauty is that which does not transport us suddenly, which does not make stormy and intoxicating impressions (such a kind easily arouses disgust), but that which slowly filter into our minds, which we take away with us almost unnoticed, and which we encounter again in our dreams; but which, however, after having long lain modestly on our hearts, takes entire possession of us, fills our eyes with tears and our hearts with longing. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
- I see the audience as the final collaborator. … It’s a living, breathing thing. I’m interested in the moments where the audience is restless. I’m interested in the moments where they lean in and become incredibly engaged: the laughter, the silence. All of that is part of how I think about shaping and rewriting the play. — Lynn Nottage, Interview Magazine
- Theater is about the collective imagination… It’s about what we can create together. — Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write
- This is theatre – the art of looking at ourselves. — Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors
- I regard the theater as the greatest of all art-forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. — Thornton Wilder, Paris Review
- The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation. — Stella Adler, Stella Adler: The Art of Acting
- Members of the audience must be respected; they must never be underestimated. — Laurence Olivier, New York Times
The Play is the Stuff of Dreams
- The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give. For we that live to please, must please to live. — Samuel Johnson, Poetry Foundation
- The art of the playwright may be the art of fantasy or of realism, but for him who understands it rightly … it can never be an art of falsification. — George Pierce Baker, Dramatic Technique
- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. — Oscar Wilde, Intentions
- Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don’t be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things. — Anton Chekhov, Letters
- Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. — Margaret Atwood, Gotham Writers
- The most important thing is to write for an audience. — David Mamet, AGNI
- Always write (and read) for the ear, not the eye. — C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis
The plays that I admire, and the playwrights that I admire, are not shying away from the complexity of racism, bias, sexism and the things that hurt us.
Paula Vogel, Vineyard Theatre
- Man’s character is his fate. — Heraclitus, Fragments
- You’re all coming together, a group of people is ideally feeling something at the same time, and you’re conjuring an invisible world through the seen world. — Sarah Ruhl, Tricycle
- It’s the function of a playwright to write. — Edward Albee, Paris Review
- As a writer, I have to believe that my only job is to try and find the truth, which is the hardest thing on earth to do. — Tony Kushner, Berkshire Magazine
- In a good play, every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple. — John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
- Some people accuse me of being too personal in my writing, but I don’t think you can escape being personal in your writing. That doesn’t mean that the dramatist is one of the characters in the play, but rather that the dynamics of the characters in the play and the tensions among them correspond to something he is personally going through. — Tennessee Williams, Playbill
- Don’t be afraid to blow up your play. — Steven Dietz, Seattle workshop
- A story must not retreat to actions of lesser quality or magnitude but move progressively forward to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another. — Robert McKee, Story
- Spectators come to hear the subtext. They can read the text at home. — Constantin Stanislavski, The Stanislavski System
The Playwright Engineers the Journey
- A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage. — Edward Albee, American Theatre
- Before I write a play, I do around two years of research, and often a lot of that reading and thinking takes place when I’m lonely and by myself out in the middle of nowhere and I can see a lot of stars. — Annie Baker, Steppenwolf
- Anything can be fodder for a play. Any question, any subject, any thing. — Neil LaBute, The Guardian
- A playwright is required by the very nature of drama to enter into the spirit of opposing characters. He is not the judge; he is a creator. — Peter Brook, The Empty Space
- I think of myself as a playwright who is socially engaged … I get very frustrated when I go to the theatre and it feels like we’re in some sort of bubble that has no relation to what’s going on in the world. — Lynn Nottage, The Interval
- Use [research] to trigger your responses but then go free. In theatre, one is never really writing about the thing you say you are writing about. There’s always another level. — Tim Crouch, New Writing South
- I’m trying to write dramatic poetry. … I’m trying to capture primarily through the rhythm and secondarily through the connotation of the word the intention of the characters. — David Mamet, Methuen
- I write from character, so it begins with people talking, which is why I like writing plays. — Wendy Wasserstein, Bomb Magazine
- The great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life. — George Bernard Shaw, Three Plays by Brieux
- Dramatists are in general rather wicked men. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human
You can’t write plays without knowing the craft of playwriting. Once you have your tools, then you still gotta create out of that thing, that impulse.
August Wilson, The Believer
A Blessing for Playwrights
Let your characters speak as they wish and act out their wants and desires. May they find what they are seeking. And may your story reach into the hearts and minds of all.
Do you have a favorite playwriting quote? Comment below.
Sandra Hosking | Author, Playwright, Poet, Photographer 
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