Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Theresa Rebeck - Page 2

I am curious about a lot of things. I'm perplexed and engaged.

I think that because television is shot on a really fast schedule, and it gets piped into your home on a smaller screen, it's much more about character and dialogue in a lot of cases than the movies are.

Watching people toss all caution to the wind, who are ready to put their lives on the line for a dream, is something that is accessible.

I have tremendous affection for New York and my life, but I'm a satirist at heart. And it's easy to satirize New York.

I actually think we should be trying to be rigorous in our thinking about television and the way it enters our lives and shapes the way so many people think.

There are times when I wonder how I ever thought that I could dramatize the death of a national discussion as a family comedy.

When people tell me I'm a prolific writer, it's a nice thing to say. But I think to myself, 'Yeah, but I don't do anything else.'

I remember when I was at Brandeis, Geoffrey Wolff, he was a great fiction-writing teacher. He was the writer-in-residence, and for those of us who wanted to be writers, you were so excited to be in the same hallway as him.

I like working with television. I do.

I think, with most writers, their neurosis is finishing things. I have a different neurosis. I'm terribly anxious when it's not finished. Then I become really difficult to live with.

It's so funny, I'm always stealing from Moliere, and nobody ever notices. I steal from him willy-nilly.

Honestly, the thing that I have found to be most useful over a long career, or maintaining a long career, is taking back the power at some point and self-producing.

New York was the Promised Land growing up. Writers were gods! The great gods of American culture... I thought.

I often find it maddening to live in America, in a way that is both amusing and horrifying to me. America clings to versions of itself that are absolutely hypocritical. I can't shake my outrage at it, so I write about it.

I let action rise out of character, really.

I do believe that there are monsters out there - and that they are monsters.

I'm an impatient person.

Generally, what I try to do is always have a money gig and an art gig.

When I was a staff writer on 'NYPD Blue,' it was truly my job to hear David Milch's voice for that show and to deliver episodes that embodied that voice.

I would rather work in the theater than anywhere else, and it does seem to be a place where stories can and should be told purely.

I make my life with New York stage actors, and I love them. They're the best actors on planet earth.

Show business is a struggle. I certainly wish that I had just blasted on the scene and not had quite such a hard time. But there's a great sense of the relief in that you don't have to prove yourself anymore.

It's one of the central problems of American culture: telling you if you're younger, more beautiful, more famous, whatever, that then you'll be happy.

I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.

The movies are all about visual, and television is all about character and dialogue.

When I go to Ohio to visit relatives on holidays, I am often astonished by the level of casual dismissal offered up by way of discussion.

In the theater, there's an emphasis on the singular voice. You know, it's your play. And in television, there's so much institutional involvement. So you end up having to negotiate with a lot of people, and that provides a kind of wear and tear on the spirit.

Moliere and Arthur Miller affected me at a very young age. In adulthood, I became overwhelmed by Chekhov. Those are my big theatrical influences.

In television, what you are doing is trying to fit your voice into a particular mold.

The economics of theater are painful. I still think that the theater community should be looking much more rigorously at how to let the playwright keep the money they make.

I work hard. I like getting to the end of things. And I write my plays that way.

We were told that hard work and talent and character would get you somewhere. At school, we learned it was important to share. On Arbor Day, we all planted trees.

I see how the Midwest distrusts the East Coast. The Midwest sees itself as morally superior. The Coast sees itself as intellectually superior. And the two are actually the same thing.

I have always worked consistently, even in small ways and even in smaller theaters where I'll do One Acts or something.

Theatre, film and television are all modes of storytelling, and many of us are fortunate enough to move freely among them without feeling that we've 'left' or need to 'go back' to one or the other. In fact, if the theatre is to avoid a brain drain, this kind of fluidity is increasingly necessary.

As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me.