Richard Greenberg Quotes & Sayings

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When you're writing plays, it's possible to believe you don't have any real world skill. When you're adapting, it is really all about the mechanics, so you feel closer to, I don't know, an accountant or someone who has a body of information. It's not all about temperament.”

“I'm always amazed by those people who get up at 5 and write till 8 and then eat a peach and walk their canary and write two hours more and then are free to collect firewood for the rest of the afternoon. Because I just walk around thinking about plays, and when they seem ready, I don't get out of my robe, and I sit down for a week and draft them.”

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

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

“The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays.”

“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.”