41 Quotes by Beau Willimon

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.

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.

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.

It's a rough and tumble game whenever power is involved - people's ambitions, their desires, their competitive spirit will often push them to play outside the rules. It's dramatic, it's interesting, and I think it's something we can all identify with to a degree.

Money is finite; it's limited by a number and what you can buy with it. Power has no limits if you're willing to go far enough in order to get as much of it as you can.

When you're lucky enough to get paid a nice chunk of change to write a movie or a TV show, you have no right to complain, really. I guess it's more of an appeal to the powers that be that the less they interfere, the more likely, actually, they are to get something that works, I think.

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.