John Patrick Shanley Quotes

20 quotes in 482 categories

• I think that certainty is a closed door, It's the end of the conversation. Doubt is an open door.
• Everything is painful, so why not be honest about the pain?
• I have doubts! I have such doubts!
• Choose Life over the other stuff. Get out of your head. Live. Dress up. Eat. Touch people. Help out. Give up. Love people. Give your…
• All plays stem from personal experience. I was reading psychoanalytic lit for a couple of years, obsessively, in depth, and I got involved in analyzing…
• Theatre is the safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done.
• Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.
• If you put someone in a room with no script to direct, they're just going to sit there. Writing scripts is the execution for a…
• dear god, whose name i do not know. thank you for my life. i forgot... how BIG... thank you. thank you for my life.
• Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite – it is a passionate…
• I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in…
• Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it…
• If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations…
• Women consume, and they must be directed what to consume, or they may identify you as lunch.
• I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in it.
• When I finally went to Ireland, I had to go. It was 1993. My father was finally too old to travel alone, and he asked…
• There is some level on which this life must occasionally become repugnant and unappetizing to you and you must step back from it. And then…
• The modern economics of the theater is such that we write plays with fewer and fewer characters.
• I adopted two children, then I got eye disease and five rounds of surgery. I went blind in one eye, then the other eye, and…
• Trying to lead an interesting life, a fruitful life, is a big challenge.

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