Quote

Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play. It seems like spelling out mysterious, musical details can destroy a play by making the motivations too clear, too simplex.

John Guare

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John Guare
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: February 5
Actor
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Protect
Clear
Motivations
Making
Spelling
Seems
Mysterious
Play
Destroy
Sometimes
Details
Life
Musical
Like
Motivation

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Feydeau's one rule of playwriting: Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B. Knock Knock. Enter Character B.
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Every play is so important. It's a record of what life was like at the time you wrote that play or that book.
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People rewrite the play so much to make it palatable to the audience, to make something clear, that they just deaden it. Like it was left it in the oven too long.
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You can't kind of take away, you either do or you don't. If you kind of take away something you're a failure.
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I wanted to be a Bride of Christ but I guess now I'm a young divorcee.
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Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.
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Like a dog, a playwright lives in an eternal present and a play is never closed.
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Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.
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Everyone talks about America, this great country. You hear, I'm more patriotic than you are. No, I'm more patriotic! But how few people know the history of this country and how we came into being. That's the part that just amazed me.
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You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am.
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Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.
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The power of the past to still dominate our thinking today.
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We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?
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The rich live hand-to-mouth too-just on a higher level.
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Oh, I never use a seat belt. I don't believe in gravity.
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You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.
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The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.
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How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes I am all random”.
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What we're dealt with hopefully is two arms, two eyes, two legs, a head, a heart. The variations, the extensions, the possibilities of the human body, what that can do
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I'm sure there are some good dramaturgs but I've never worked with one.
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