I'm a natural born show off. I love performing, and at school we had a really good music scene and an even better drama scene. When I got to university, I played in bands and did sketch stuff and it was always about coming up with material, which is why I never really practised and have no chops!! When I left uni, I carried on playing and trying out at stand-up.
That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe-the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas.
A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.
On the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day.
When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.
Comedy is more difficult than drama. I think it's really difficult to make someone laugh because people have very different comedic sensibilities. In drama, you can get away with being a great actor and surrounded by great actors and having good writing. But in comedy you have to listen and you have to perform with a certain rhythm, because if you don't, it's like playing a wrong note in the orchestra and you can hear the off key and it will fall flat and you won't get that instant response.
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work."
An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personalimportance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.
I feel like a lot of my past career was going to film school, making a lot of different kinds of movies. I made a bunch of comedies, I made one drama and I made a couple musicals.
Drama is the most difficult of all arts. In it two things are to be satisfied - first, the ears, and second, the eyes. To paint a scene, if one thing be painted, it is easy enough; but to paint different things and yet to keep up the central interest is very difficult. Another difficult thing is stage - management, that is, combining different things in such a manner as to keep the central interest intact.
Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.
Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?