40 Quotes by Christopher Durang

In my 20s, I was more cynical/despairing (even though I still wrote comically), but I often sent audiences home with rather dark last moments. After a while though, I don't want to send the audience home bummed out, or distressed ... I want to see what's hopeful. I'm not overly cheery all the time, and yet I'm not suicidal either. I do think people can make choices that make their lives happier.

It is a sin to follow your horoscope because only God knows the future and He won't tell us. Also, we can tell horoscopes are false because according to astrology, Christ would have been a Capricorn, and Capricorn people are cold, ambitious and attracted to Scorpio and Virgo, and we know that Christ was warm, loving, and not attracted to anybody.

I love actors. I enjoy their company, and I get excited each and every time they bring a character I've written to life. Every so often a talented actor doesn't hook in correctly to a character; or someone gets lost in a labyrinth of over-complicated thoughts, and the character and play suffer. However, most of the time I find actors either end up doing exactly what was in my head, or sometimes do something even better.

As a citizen I felt appalled that we WENT TO WAR over faulty information - that felt false or at least "stretched" from the first time they started to push the idea that Iraq and 9/11 were connected, though they didn't seem to be and there was no logical reason for thinking they were. It's like your neighbors the Smiths burned your house down, and then the next day you retaliated by burning down the Jones' house.

Will this long presidency of George W. Bush ever be over? Living through it is starting to seem like some ghastly, upsetting novel in which the hero is the country, and the president is this disturbing, pig-headed, oblivious villain who makes things worse and worse and worse.

Here is the key to existence. Are you listening? Here is the key to existence; when I tell you this you will know how to run your lives. You will know if you have been living life to the full, and if you realize you haven't been, you will know immediately how to correct that state of affairs. As soon as I tell you the key to existence. Are you ready? Are you ready for me to tell you?... Always breathe. That's the basis of life, breathing. That's basically the basis. If you don't breathe, you die.

I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I'm going along.

So many American plays are about family. When you're in the first part of your life, you write about family a lot. I find with my absurdist plays that I was actually writing about my family, but so disguised I didn't realize it myself.

Unless you go through all the genuine angers you feel, both justified and unjustified, the feelings of love that you have will not have any legitimate base and will be at least partially false. Plus, eventually you will go crazy.