A Quote by Tracy Letts
I like Shakespeare, but I never know what the hell is going on.
Related Quotes
My parents would always take me to the theatre, and I was bored a lot of the time. Loads of Shakespeare, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. And then, when I was 13, we went to see 'The Cherry Orchard,' and it changed everything for me.
When you play me, I'm going to get right up in your grill and let you know it's going to be a long day. It's going to be physical. It's going to be something you don't like. It's going to be hell.
It's easier to do Shakespeare than Spelling, and I know that sounds crazy, because the challenge of Shakespeare is living up to Shakespeare, living up to that word, not failing, you know, where with Aaron Spelling it's like, just try to look good. Or maybe don't use Spelling there, that's bad. No - you can. He's dead.
Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.
A lot of people have a fear of Shakespeare. Even actors do. People are like, "Oh, I won't go and see Shakespeare because the language is so hard," but it is. When you read it on the page, you go, "What?! What does that mean?!" If you go to a Shakespeare play and you've never been, you sit there and go, "I'm an idiot! I don't get it!"
I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.
People are going to say, ‘Well, it’s not very truthful.’ But a songwriter doesn’t care about what’s truthful. What he cares about is what should’ve happened, what could’ve happened. That’s its own kind of truth. It’s like people who read Shakespeare plays, but they never see a Shakespeare play. I think they just use his name.
All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.
What if God's a woman? Not only am I going to hell - I'll never know why!
What if God's a woman? Not only am I going to hell, I'll never know why!
There are generations of people who have never seen a big plate painting in person. And they don't know what the hell they look like, they don't know what it feels like to stand in a room with them.
I learned to smile by going through hell. Now I know what hell is and you don't. I can't tell you how it is, cause you can't do it with words.
You never really know what's going to happen. You never know what the audience is going to be like or how they're going to behave.
If you like poetry let it be first rate, Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith Pope (if you will though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth and Southey. Now Ellen don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare, and Byron. Both these were great Men and their works are like themselves, You will know how to chuse the good and avoid the evil, the finestpassages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting you will never wish to read them over twice.
Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. Granted, you don't have the physical disruption and disorientation, but writing a novel is like entering a new culture. You don't know what the hell is going on. And every day you feel like you have nothing, you're going nowhere. Or you feel that first it's going somewhere, but then you get into that horrible middle part.
The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.
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