Kelly Younger Cups o' Wisdom for Life in the Theatre

Romulus Linney

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:24:31 +0000

“There are 3 basic human needs. Food, sex, and the desire to rewrite someone else’s play.”

Plato

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:03:09 +0000

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Darrell Royal

playwright Kelly Younger — Mon, 09 May 2011 18:03:17 +0000

“You gotta dance with the girl that brung you.”

Rod Serling

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:57:38 +0000

(a clip from Mike Wallace’s interview)

Henry David Thoreau

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 03:07:35 +0000

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Charles McNulty

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:51:20 +0000

“…theater people will forgive a noble flop, but perfunctory dullness is an unpardonable sin.”

Anton Chekhov

playwright Kelly Younger — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:18:23 +0000

“… if we want to have any real life in the present, we have to do something to make up for our past, we have to get over it, and the only way to do that is to make sacrifices, get down to work, and work harder than we’ve ever worked before.” (from The Cherry Orchard)

Cary Tennis

playwright Kelly Younger — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:48:57 +0000

“Remember that as a writer you must find your motivation internally, not in external rewards, and you work in opposition to the system, not as a supplicant to the system. Whatever contingent truces you have maintained with the system in order to participate in its orderly orgies of consumption and distribution, good for you. But you are not a part of the system. You are a free creative worker. You do not need the system to do your creating. You only need it as a utility to reach your audience, and increasingly not even for that. On the other hand, the system cannot create anything on its own. It can only manage and distribute. So it needs you. It needs you but it is not on your side. Remember that.”

Darrell Royal

playwright Kelly Younger — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 01:17:55 +0000

“You gotta dance with the girl that brung you.”

Kevin Spacey

playwright Kelly Younger — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 20:46:34 +0000

(a clip from Inside the Actors Studio)

William Kennedy

playwright Kelly Younger — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 19:45:51 +0000

“The trick is to renew your vulnerability. You do your best. The critics either like it or they don’t, but the important thing is to persist.”

Ben Hecht

playwright Kelly Younger — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 14:10:50 +0000

“Responding to criticism is a foolish thing for a writer to do, and an unpleasant one. It is much better to read only the advertisements of our work and not, briefly, your royalty reports. These will tell you how popular you are. How good you are, or are not, is a thing you should know only too well yourself.”

Bruno Bettelheim

playwright Kelly Younger — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:00:46 +0000

“There is no greater threat in life than that we will be deserted, left all alone. Psychoanalysis has named this — man’s greatest fear — separation anxiety; and the younger we are, the more excruciating is our anxiety when we feel deserted, for the young child actually perishes when not adequately protected and taken care of. Therefore, the ultimate consolation is that we shall never be deserted.”

Marsha Norman

playwright Kelly Younger — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17:36:27 +0000

“Plays are stories about need.”

Brian Clark

playwright Kelly Younger — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:49:31 +0000

“Someone once said recently, I can’t remember who, ‘The playwright’s spiritual ancestor is not a poet but a juggler.’”

Horace

playwright Kelly Younger — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:43:26 +0000

“To have good sense, is the first principle and fountain of writing well. … Let whatever is imagined for the sake of entertainment have as much likeness to truth as possible.”

Alfred Uhry

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:08:40 +0000

“It’s very important for a playwright to be able to listen to the reading and not be so frightened that you can’t hear anything. You’ve got to make yourself do that. It’s really hard. Everybody is looking at me. It’s nightmare time.”

Donald Barthelme

playwright Kelly Younger — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:00:59 +0000

“Write about what you’re most afraid of.”

O. Henry

playwright Kelly Younger — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:03:54 +0000

“Write what makes you happy.”

William Shakespeare

playwright Kelly Younger — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:46:33 +0000

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart.
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

(Sonnet 23)

Peter Brook

playwright Kelly Younger — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:58:51 +0000

“The one thing that distinguishes the theatre from all the other arts is that it has no permanence.”

Harold Clurman

playwright Kelly Younger — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 12:55:35 +0000

“There is an element of hazard (beyond the monetary) in all theatrical production and it is part of the theatre’s challenge that it should exist. it is a serious fault to be overfearful of failure. Many an artist has been crippled by it.”

David Mamet

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:59:56 +0000

“When you sit down to write, tell the truth from one moment to the next and see where it takes you.”

Caesar Augustus’s last words

playwright Kelly Younger — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:48:34 +0000

“Acta est fabula, plaudite!” (The play is over, applaud!).

Truman Capote

playwright Kelly Younger — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:57:05 +0000

“A boy has to peddle his book.”

William Faulkner

playwright Kelly Younger — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:54:46 +0000

“The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don’t.”

Moliere

playwright Kelly Younger — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:52:09 +0000

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for the money.”

Shakespeare’s Globe

playwright Kelly Younger — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:00:42 +0000

“Totus mundus agit histrionem” (All the world plays the actor).

Jose Rivera

playwright Kelly Younger — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 12:04:03 +0000

“Only listen to those people who have a vested interest in your future.”

Arthur Laurents

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:01:01 +0000

“…never make a transition on the dialogue; transitions should always come out of emotion.”

Marsha Norman

playwright Kelly Younger — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:00:59 +0000

“If you know a story about a brave human being in big trouble, write that. Write how the trouble started, what the person did, and how it turned out. Little troubles, for example, troubles that will solve themselves just by the person growing up, you don’t need to waste your time on those. Write about greed, revenge, rage, betrayal, guilt, adultery, and murder. When writing about softer troubles such as injustice, loss, humiliation, incapacity, aging, sadness and being misunderstood, just be sure to attach them to one of the more active troubles. Attach betrayal to loss and you have a play. Attach adultery to aging and you have a play. And let fear drive the whole thing.”

Tina Howe

playwright Kelly Younger — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:00:51 +0000

“…when you write a kitchen-sink drama, people tend to behave in a kitchen-sink kind of way. But take those characters out of the kitchen and … they’ll act differently. … After all, where your characters are determines what they do.”

Alfred Uhry

playwright Kelly Younger — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:00:41 +0000

“A playwright needs a good ear.”

Eric Bogosian

playwright Kelly Younger — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:00:17 +0000

“…Q&As are so popular in the regional theaters. Because everyone wants to know what the play is ‘about.’ It’s a great way of avoiding what a play is. Do we really need a Q&A about George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?“

John Guare

playwright Kelly Younger — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:00:30 +0000

“You can write the sharpest, most glittery, wisest, poetic, hilariously dazzling dialogue, but if that dialogue doesn’t do its true work and open the dramatic world underneath, it’s dead on arrival.”

William Butler Yeats

playwright Kelly Younger — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 12:00:12 +0000

“Our words must seem to be inevitable.”

Arthur Miller

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:00:52 +0000

“For myself, it has never been possible to generate the energy to write and complete a play if I know in advance everything it signifies and all it will contain. The very impulse to write, I think, springs from an inner chaos crying for order, for meaning, and that meaning must be discovered in the process of writing or the work lies dead as it is finished.”

Barnaby Conrad

playwright Kelly Younger — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:00:19 +0000

“Front-rank characters should have some defect, some conflicting inner polarity, some real or imagined inadequacy.”

Ann Sexton

playwright Kelly Younger — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:00:15 +0000

“Tell almost the whole story.”

Edward Albee

playwright Kelly Younger — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:00:19 +0000

“It is a tough racket. It can be pretty heartbreaking, and you really have to, deep down, have a toughness to yourself, or you’re not going to be able to survive in the theater.”

T.S. Eliot

playwright Kelly Younger — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:00:45 +0000

“Whatever you do … avoid piles.”

Moss Hart

playwright Kelly Younger — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 22:38:57 +0000

“One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty damn quick.”

Anton Chekhov

playwright Kelly Younger — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 21:49:50 +0000

“The artist observes, selects, guesses, and arranges; every one of these operations presupposes a question at its outset. If he has not asked himself a question at the start, he has nothing to guess and nothing to select.”

Theresa Rebeck

playwright Kelly Younger — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:58:43 +0000

“You know, this is going to ruin your life, to be a playwright. So, make it worth it.”

Richard Easton

playwright Kelly Younger — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:56:01 +0000

“One always has to remember that the playwright is the artist in the theatre, and the actor is a craftsman.”

Alan Ayckbourne

playwright Kelly Younger — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:54:14 +0000

“If a play can be too simple, it can also be too complicated. If one element is particularly complicated, keep the rest of it simple.”

Jack London

playwright Kelly Younger — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:51:14 +0000

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

Tennessee Williams

playwright Kelly Younger — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:48:32 +0000

“The best thing you can do about critics is never say a word. In the end you have the last say, and they know it.”

David Mamet

playwright Kelly Younger — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 20:17:57 +0000

“Be prepared, be early, never complain, help your fellows, figure it out – your capacity for work is vastly greater than you suppose.”