Best 2427 quotes in «drama quotes» category

Americans don’t want drama, especially good drama, they just want their boredom killed.

American radio is the reverse of the Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare's time the world's greatest dramas were acted with the most primitive technical arrangements; on the American air the world's most primitive writing is performed under perfect technical conditions.

Americans must outgrow the unbecoming arrogance that leads us to assert that America somehow owns a monopoly on goodness and truth - a belief that leads some to view the world as but a stage on which to play out the great historical drama: the United States of America versus the Powers of Evil.

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

An actor who is good at comedy can also be very good at drama, but not necessarily vice versa.

An age where you feel like you could love anyone, where you put everything on the line for the smallest of things. Eighteen. Adults say that it's an age where we laugh if a leaf tumbles by. But back then, we were more serious than any adult, more intense, and had our strength tested. 1997. That was how our eighteen was beginning.

An actor is looking for conflict. Conflict is what creates drama. We are taught to avoid trouble [so] actors don't realize they must go looking for it. Plays are written about...the extraordinary, the unusual, the climaxes. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance.

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.

And knowing that the only alternative to your grief is the nothingness that’s fast approaching, you try to embrace your own sorrow, to be open and empty and let it all pass through you. This is the key, you have learned – to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control. Even in this late drama, to try to control is to go mad. And so you do your best to let it all go.

And the only studies were - Rodney Dangerfield was my mentor and he was my Yale drama school for comedy.

And you know, whether it's drama or comedy, the best work is based on truth. It's just that, with comedy, the circumstances are just crazy-heightened, and you have these crazy things thrown at you. But you still have to do it truthfully, because that's where the humor comes from. So it's not that difficult to cross over.

Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.

An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward.

An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.

Any performer would love to have the opportunity to be able to express themselves in many different areas. If you feel confident in those areas, you would hope to have the opportunity to do them, whether it's drama, comedy, musical, or whatever your interests are.

Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

Anything has a rhythm to it, comedy or drama. There has to be a musicality to it. And everybody can't play the same instrument, ideally. But I think that we all have the same comedic tendencies, and that's why it works. We all sort of agree with what's funny.

A person has to live in a house for it not to break down.

A perfect method of adding drama to life is to wait until the deadline looms large.

A person like me... isn't even worth the tip of a toe. I can't even compare to half.

Architecture is a small piece of this human equation, but for those of us who practice it, we believe in its potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the human experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstandin g and provide a beautiful context for life's drama.

A piercing satire, a poignant family drama and an investigation of the competing claims of honesty, loyalty, ambition and love.

Apparently, before we are born, each of us experiences a vision of what our life can be, complete with reflections on our parents and our tendencies to engage in particular control dramas, even how we might work through these dramas with these parents and go on to be prepared for what we want to accomplish.

A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.

Are we just pretending to be unhappy so that we can add drama to our lives, so that we seem more substantial?

Are you smiling? I'm so angry it kills me. So angry I'm going crazy. I'm just going to wait today. Just today.

As a boy, I'd always had an interest in theater. But the idea at my school was that drama and music were to round out the man. It wasn't what one did for a living. I got over that.

Art is humanity's most essential, most universal language. It is not a frill, but a necessary part of communication. The quality of civilization can be measured through its music, dance, drama, architecture, visual art and literature. We must give our children knowledge and understanding of civilization's most profound works.

As a child, everyone dreams of finding treasure. There's romance and drama. But as an adult most people aren't going to spend their lives trying to find it.

A sack that can contain a person's greed...doesn't exist in this world. If your hearts not content, no matter how much you put in the sack, it's never enough.

As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world.

As a drama student I got into Thirties and Forties suits.

As a woman, she [Penelope Cruz] obviously has changed as she has become an adult. But, as an actress, I actually might say that she has not changed that much. And she has something great, especially in comedy, and she hasn't been exploited as much as she could be in comedy, but particularly in that mix between comedy and drama. She's got a very special quality about her. You can place her in very extreme situations, especially very painful situations, in terms of how her character interprets it. And sometimes, the deeper and more human that pain is, the better she is at it.

As an art form, opera is a rare and remarkable creation. For me, it expresses aspects of the human drama that cannot be expressed in any other way, or certainly not as beautifully.

As an actor, the first thing you learn in drama school is you never judge.

As an actor you really want to push yourself, and there's no better way than to do an intense drama.

As a writer, I haven't delved into dramatic writing. As an actor, I could always, even more so than comedy, do drama. When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.

A scar left behind by a woman typically goes forever.

As an actress, I get plenty of drama in my professional life. When I'm at home, I want a peaceful life.

As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we?

As a writer, I haven't delved into dramatic writing. As an actor, I could always, even more so than comedy, do drama.

As a writer I'm committed to exploring what I call "The invisible things" - the things that people aren't talking about. I think that's where the juiciest conversations and the juiciest drama lives. My goal with the series is to get people talking about and reflecting on how issues of race play out in their own lives. Since I've spent a fair amount of time watching time travel shows and movies where the leads are White (and can blend in really easily no matter the time period) I thought I would turn that on its head and see what might happen.

As for acting, I took drama lessons when I was in high school.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

As God is omnipresent in the cosmos but is undisturbed by its variety, so man, who as a soul is individualized Spirit, must learn to participate in this cosmic drama with a perfectly poised and equilibrated mind.

As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize.