Terrence McNally Quotations

If you're trying to write something that you don't understand and embrace at the very core of you, it's not going to turn out with quite the authenticity and passion it should have.

Cheating is not the American way. It is small, while we are large. It is cheap, while we are richly endowed. It is destructive, while we are creative. It is doomed to fail, while our gifts and responsibilities call us to achieve. It sabotages trust and weakens the bonds of spirit and humanity, without which we perish.

I may think I have inalienable rights to be alive and happy, but I don't - life is a blessing.

I like to surprise myself. I've always been attracted to projects where I don't know how they're going to turn out.

I'm of the school 'Write what you know.' You can educate yourself, but the best writing usually comes from the heart.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.

Young people have got to start their own theaters, really. All good theater is a kind of mom-and-pop operation. Start your own theater.

I've had wonderful collaborators. They're very different, just as actors are. Working on a show with Nathan Lane is different from working on a show with Chita Rivera. It keeps you on your toes because it's different every time.

My first play was written when I was 23, and I'm 66 now, so that's 43 years of doing this where I sort of know where everything is. It doesn't mean I do everything right, but I know where everything is. Here, I'm very much a visitor. New York is my turf and I'm used to working with my actors.

I said if they wanted to keep the British setting in Northern England, then I will bow out, because that's not my lingo.

This play was written for these 11 actors just as 'Master Class' was written for Zoe Caldwell, or 'Frankie and Johnny' was written for Kathy Bates,

It was a time of oppression and you spoke up -- and we won. Without you, I wouldn't be standing up here either.

The New York theater community is a place I know my way around in with some certainty,

Chita Rivera is our strongest link to the Golden Age of the American Musical. She worked with all the great choreographers and composers and was present at the creation of such seminal masterpieces as The Dance at the Gym from West Side Story when the talent in the room was a veritable Mount Rushmore of the American theatre: Bernstein, Sondheim, Robbins, Laurents and Prince. I hope our show reminds audiences of what that level of theatre was like and what it still can be if the talent, the technique and the passion are there. Chita Rivera: The Dancers Life looks back in order to look forward.

Chita Rivera is our strongest link to the Golden Age of the American musical, ... She worked with all the great choreographers and composers and was present for the creation of such seminal masterpieces.

Whenever you think you're writing what other people want to hear from you, and that it'll be commercial, you're doomed to disaster. Writing has to be as truthful and specific as we can make it. The minute we think that we're reaching more people and pleasing them, we get general. And audiences sense that and turn away, shun us.

Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.

In those days, you had to like one or the other. You couldn't like Sutherland AND Callas.

There are so many rules about play writing. I'd have a nervous breakdown if I followed them.

Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.

I don't think I've ever written anything even remotely naturalistic. The closest probably would be seen as 'Frankie and Johnny,' and that's only 'cause they eat a sandwich and make an omelet in act two. But it's a romantic fairy tale, and I'm very aware of that. I don't think it helps the actors in my plays to lose themselves in the reality of talking to another person. A good McNally actor always knows he's in a play with an audience.