Richard Greenberg Quotes

It’s weird, because I don’t feel prolific. I don’t write anything for months at a time.

I don’t write a play from beginning to end. I don’t write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It’s not all in ether. It’s on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what’s missing, and that’s my first draft.

Frankly, seeing my plays with an audience is something I do with gritted teeth; I find the experience very difficult. I love the moment when you have just the dress rehearsal, when no one’s there; that’s kind of the peak to me. When people start filing in, I like to file out.

I started in the era when Hollywood reveled in being the most cost-inefficient industry on the planet. They used to commission a hundred scripts for every one they made.

My friends and family have been so well trained that they know I really mean it when I say that I don’t care if the review is good, because that can be as dangerous as when it’s bad. It’s less demoralizing, but it can be just as confusing.

I’m sort of anti-Aristotelian. I want to get an entire life onstage while conveying a sense of how time feels, how unstoppable it is, and how we don’t really know what’s going on because as we’re trying to weave, it’s weaving us.

It seems that the hurdle you have to jump over is everyone’s informed opinion. When you’re a young playwright, you’re probably too precarious in your own technique to understand that when these seemingly informed opinions are contradicting each other, it becomes this paralyzing monolith.

When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we’ve lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat.

My mother wanted me to be a writer. But she was a child of the Depression and never understood that she wasn’t poor. So, you know, the idea of not having a job, it would creep through. But she tried very hard to be subtle about it.

I came to New York, and it was fascinating and intimidating and yielding, and all the stuff it’s supposed to be. But whatever the abstract essence I was seeking, I couldn’t find exactly that.

I think I’m a writer, and it’s my job. People in other professions are expected to do their jobs all the time. Why shouldn’t I?

By the time I started writing plays, Broadway was never an expectation, so it’s never been central.

I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.

I do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.

People talk about alienation in the city. Diners are a place where you feel comfortable, an extension of your house.