37 Quotes by Israel Horovitz

Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place.

While directing in theater that the actors will - I don't know if it's competitiveness or what it is, but they love to make each other laugh. They love to impress each other in rehearsal. They'll try something for a reaction. But in film, you're very often not all together in the room at the same time. You're shooting one day, somebody else is shooting the next. It's a totally different dynamic.

I don't direct the plays of others.

If you prepare, and you've got wonderful, bright people who get it, who accept and appreciate your preparation, then you don't have to explain yourself 9,000 times.

There is no crime greater, or more worthy of punishment, than being strange and frightened among the strange and frightened; except assimilation to the end of becoming strange and frightened, but apart from ones own real self.

I am an internationally produced playwright.

Radical politics tend to be simple minded.

I parle Francais like a Spanish cow.

France is very welcoming to foreign writers.