I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
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"Tom Stoppard," profile by Kenneth Tynan, The New Yorker (1977-12-19)Tom Stoppard
Well, all the plays that I was trying to write … were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.
Arthur Miller
Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and tortuous to write a bad one.
Anton Chekhov
The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language, but in their behavior as well.
Eugene Ionesco
If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.
Pauline Kael
Stoppard, Tom
Stork, Nigel
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