Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by George C. Wolfe

The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private.

Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.

You've got to make the rehearsal room very safe. You can't bully people, because if you bully people, they're going to freeze and lock up.

I was raised to believe that other people's suffering was my responsibility.

The wonderful thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. The worst thing about theater is that it has so many people involved in the creation of it. That dynamic is thrilling and challenging every time you make a show.

I love working with a set designer because, in many respects, you meet the set designer before you meet the actors. So it's a chance for me as a director to figure out what I'm thinking and to explore how the space is going to actually be activated.

In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.

At the end of the day, 'Shuffle Along' is about people coming together and making something extraordinary - and history not necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of doing, regardless of the consequences.

The only rule of a musical is that it must maintain its buoyancy.

Racists are deficient as human beings.

To want to come to New York, you have to have a sense of wonder about the world and a foolish sense of worth about yourself. And I, too, had both of those things.

Always, when I do a play, there's got to be an equation of risks and potential failure. When you're working on a new play, it's like, 'How the hell do I do this, and do we have the time?' All of these huge questions engage, hopefully, the smartest part of me. And then when you're doing a revival, I went, 'Well, somebody's already solved it.'

I like to knock down walls and allow others to enter.

I think we all have a primal desire to know as much as we can to find out about where we come from.

A lot of directors tend to manipulate actors' vulnerability to get what they want, and that can work.

1985 - That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.

When you're writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you're directing, you're serving everybody - in the guise of acting like everybody's serving you. But you're really serving the materials. You're serving the actors. You're in charge, but it's not free.

Producing has empowered me as an artist in a specific way. It's forced a certain kind of maturity.

The rules I sort of live by for my theater career, which I hope to live for my film career, is that if there's something that intrigues me or fascinates me, or I don't know how to do it, then I should do it.

My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.

I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted.

I feel like I'm edgy and I'm funny and I got this bite, this outrageousness.

On different projects, different pieces of you will show up. Sometimes it's surprising which piece shows up.

Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess.

I pride myself on being available to as many people's stories as I possibly can.

The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.

As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.

Commercial theater, in its agenda to appeal to everybody, is often at the expense of the unique vision of the artist.

Our lives are connected in ways we can't imagine. They're connected even before we know they're connected.

I'm perpetually interested by living in places as an artist confronting challenges I've never confronted before and approaching them with as much craft and humanity as I can.

I think I am the first person of color to direct a major white play on Broadway. In 1993? That's astounding to me. And horrifying to me.

I'm the most democratic fascist you'll ever meet. I listen to everybody, and then I make a decision.

When I was on dialysis, I willed myself to do 'On the Town.' It accesses my most childlike, joyful love of theater.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

I personally am a very big fan of 'Romeo + Juliet.' It had a visceral power to it that I thought was just exhilarating. It was a very arresting and very disturbing and deeply compelling version of the play.

I feel like I've been very blessed in the sense that I've had the veracity of spirit to not be stopped and, at the same time, the protective energy and the generosity of those who have come before me, who saw something inside of me and, therefore, invited me into rooms that I would not have been inside of otherwise.

There is a strange kind of parental pride when 'Topdog' ends up on Broadway, or 'Elaine Stritch.'

If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn't be locked out of the room.

Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.

AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.

Doing any kind of culture in America in which you are not trying to affirm a European aesthetic is war.

It's easier to be cynical and edgy and tough rather than overly emotional.

I don't go, like, 'Hmm, I'm now going to create something for the black community.' I just feel this compelling urge. I just feel myself drawn to stories that I feel have a potency and immediacy.

A lot of '20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.

There are a lot of people who will tell you I'm very ruthless. I'm very fierce. If I feel I'm right, if I feel I've been violated, then I am like a warrior from hell!

I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.

I love Kabuki, Noh theater and bunraku.

When 'Jelly's' went out on tour, no one really wanted it. It was undersold. And I knew if I gave 'Noise' to someone else, they would sell it as 'Stomp' with little dancing black boys.

I've always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other.

One of the things I learned very early on was that if you cast the show correctly, and if you've created the right energy in the room, the solution is also in the room. The solution doesn't necessarily come from someone, but if everybody is working in a very steadfast and rigorous way, then everything you're looking for is in the room.

In the early '90s or so, I drove my father to Providence, Ky., his hometown, and he was pointing out, 'That's where the doctor's office was,' and 'That's where we bought ice cream.' And he was pointing to empty lots. When you lose communities, what do you have? We often survive by remembering the stories.

Certain events make people come out of their little boxes and become part of the whole.

When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.

Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess!

It may take a while, but I think 'On the Town' has the potential for us to break down the boundaries between the traditional theatergoer who may have fond memories of the musical and those with a 'Broadway-is-not-for-me' agenda.

Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are.

There's no place more theatrical than history.

When 'The Normal Heart' first appeared, the sense of urgency was so important.

I'm convinced whenever something opens on Broadway, it's a miracle. It's a miracle that people survived.

I'm interested in exploring how an individual maintains a sense of power in a world that tends to make individuals feel powerless.