Beau Willimon Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“Real leaders have to live a paradoxical life, where they must break the rules in order to maintain them. If your expectations are high, you're setting yourself up for disillusionment. The land of governance is paved with gray streets, not black or white ones.”

“The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.”

“I was always a writer - working on campaigns was never a profession for me. It was something I did on the side, really, so the trajectory hasn't been a political operative who likes to dabble in writing and finds himself into stumbling on film and TV - that was always my goal.”

“In politics, it's very theatrical. There's a lot of stage craft. The campaign is trying to tell a story that they want people to believe in, and candidates are playing the role, like actors, by a creative personae that people will be attracted to.”

“Writing plays supplied for me everything that painting didn't, which is the ability to tell stories in real time, in a real space, in three dimensions, in flesh and blood. I realized I had been trying to cram all this narrative into my paintings, but ultimately painting was a static medium. So it just opened up this whole new door.”

“The reality is that politicians, in terms of the amount of power they wield and the amount that they work, don't actually make that much money.”

“We all experience power struggles in our lives - at the workplace, with our friends, in our love lives. In a way, we're all politicians.”

“You just have to re-wire your brain when you're shifting from the stage to the screen or the silver screen or the HD flat screen.”

“My jobs on campaigns were pretty low on the totem pole - I was an advance man.”

“The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.”