Ellen McLaughlin famous quotes

I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.
-- Ellen McLaughlin

#Writing #Order #Land

The sensation of flying is incredible, and its such a miraculous notion to go into the air and see the world without delineation.
-- Ellen McLaughlin

#Air #Flying #World

In Angels in America, I got to fulfill a lifelong dream. I was in the air eight nights a week for two years, and I just loved it.
-- Ellen McLaughlin

#Dream #Angel #Night

I'm an actor and a playwright, and I don't earn much.
-- Ellen McLaughlin

#Actors #Playwright

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.

I had casually rented an apartment that cost $75 a month because I expected my writing to pay my way.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Order, thou eye of action.

The search for safety takes its clearest form... in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis... to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.

There's a certain level of pageantry with 'Idol,' and in order to work the show, you kind of have to feed into it.

When Israel was from bondage led,Led by the Almighty's handFrom out of foreign land,The great sea beheld and fled.

A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history.

California ... is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.