Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by John Guare

It's a lucky life to be a playwright.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

I mean New York City is the financial capital of the world. It's where all the money passes through, the Dow Jones, whatever, that's where all the money goes.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet.

I've had students at Yale: my main task with them in drama school was not helping them with their writing but showing them how valuable they were. Because they're ready to give it up and go into teaching or television.

I think that every year that the New York City Ballet is alive is worthy of celebration. Because otherwise the terrible thing is just that we take it for granted.

Plays have a celebratory nature that no other form has. Theater always meant celebration, a birthday, a reward for good grades. I felt at home in a theater. I loved being part of an audience. All the rules - the audience has to see the play on a certain date at a certain time in a certain place in a certain seat.

I like to ground plays in reality so they can jump higher. So we can account for the trampoline, so we can account for the leap.

You must keep people happy backstage because that affects what's onstage. During a run, the playwright feels like the mayor of a small town filled with noble creatures who have to get out there and make it brand new every night. When a production works, it's unlike any other joy in the world.

The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.

And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.

I ushered at the Shubert in New Haven during graduate school when plays en route to Broadway still went out of town to try out. I worked backstage at summer stock doing jobs from garbage man to strapping on Herbert Marshall's wooden leg to fixing Gloria Swanson's broken plumbing in her dressing room with her yelling at me as I worked the plunger.

Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.

All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs.

What we're dealt with hopefully is two arms, two eyes, two legs, a head, a heart. The variations, the extensions, the possibilities of the human body, what that can do.

The ballet makes us look at those bodies, it makes us listen to that music, it makes us wonder at the geometry, of the way they come together. The way that extraordinary space is controlled and given such emotional force.

Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.

The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

To stay around any place you love, you have to have a job. In college at Georgetown in the fifties, I got my first theater job checking coats at the National, which was Washington's main theater.

Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.

And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.

I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner.

I wanted to be a Bride of Christ but I guess now I'm a young divorcee.

The power of the past to still dominate our thinking today.

The only riots were the people trying to get tickets.

James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

Eugene O'Neil created an American theater, and Tennessee Williams taught it how to sing.

We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

You can't be a sort of pioneer.

I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg. I believe in a theater where the director and the playwright work together to create what they need.

I think that some of these plays are lost in this new horror called development, which is a place for dramaturgs to say "let me tell you what your play means," and the life gets sucked out of a play.

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg.

Every play is so important. It's a record of what life was like at the time you wrote that play or that book.

New Orleans was a thrilling place of all kinds of races, it was a dangerous place. It was really and truly the only international city on the continent of North America. There were all different races and everything was celebrated, and it was a place of difference, and everybody was different and it was so odd, the minute that America took over, the minute that the Louisiana territory became part of the United States of America, instantly you were either black or white. There was no nuance. and so a free man of color who could own property was suddenly not allowed to.

You don't push the button that says "Now I will write something that resonates in time." You don't know. It's what happens after a play is finished.

Feydeau's one rule of playwriting: Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B. Knock Knock. Enter Character B.

The rich live hand-to-mouth too-just on a higher level.

It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.

I only do business with the people I do business with. The people I do business with find out I do business with the people I don't do business with.... I can't do business with you.

There's no such thing as a perfect play. Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play.

I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?

Like a dog, a playwright lives in an eternal present and a play is never closed.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

You can't kind of take away, you either do or you don't. If you kind of take away something you're a failure.

Oh, I never use a seat belt. I don't believe in gravity.

I don't think about taking a risk. I think about how far can I go. How can I make myself. What are the risks I must create.

The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril.... The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.

Oh god, I'd just hate it if a certain dramaturg got a hold of a Pinter play, for example, which are all mystery and all music. That's how the life get's sucked out of plays.

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.

1975 is as much a historical document as 1803.

Everyone talks about America, this great country. You hear, "I'm more patriotic than you are. No, I'm more patriotic!" But how few people know the history of this country and how we came into being. That's the part that just amazed me.

Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play. It seems like spelling out mysterious, musical details can destroy a play by making the motivations too clear, too simplex.

I'm an American playwright. Tennessee Williams got in all our DNA.

I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.

How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random”.

What we're dealt with hopefully is two arms, two eyes, two legs, a head, a heart. The variations, the extensions, the possibilities of the human body, what that can do

The great risk is always saying, "how will I communicate what I'm trying to get across to a room full of strangers sitting in the dark watching a stage?"