Everybody makes their own fun. If you don’t make it yourself, it isn’t fun. It’s entertainment.
If you’re writing an opinion piece, it’s your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
I used to think I’d like to be a fireman – in fact, I still would – and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.
My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it’s still evolving in different ways.
You know, young actors say all the time, ‘Should I use my own life experience?’ And my response is, ‘What choice do you have?’
It’s upsetting to be a man in our society.
It’s hard to write a good plot, it’s very hard.
It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
In Chicago, we love our crooks!
In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn’t threaten us.
The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.
American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent’s goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.
Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.
I love all insider memoirs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have.
It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.
No one enjoys being equal.
The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.
Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?
The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.