53 Quotes by John Patrick Shanley

I've been writing plays since the seventies and only came to moviemaking when I basically realized that I needed some money to pay the rent. I started to watch films with an eye to figuring out how to write them.

Back when you were doing plays like 'The Miracle Worker,' you had 20, 25 people in the cast. When you go to make the film, that's not such a stretch. But when you're doing plays like 'Proof,' it's just five people or something in the thing, and it gets to be a really difficult re-conception.

The modern economics of the theater is such that we write plays with fewer and fewer characters.

'The Miracle Worker' is just such an incredibly powerful play on stage, and is so kinetic, and athletic.

It wasn't until I was 35 or 36, when I wrote 'Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,' that I began to get some notoriety, though I only made $5,000.

I've done very well in the film business. Whenever I have wanted something, the film business has given it to me. I'm very fortunate. My big problem in life has always been, 'What do I want?'

I'm Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish music, but stayed away from the old country till I was over 40. I just couldn't own being Irish.

dear god, whose name i do not know. thank you for my life. i forgot... how BIG... thank you. thank you for my life.

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 everyone around me. . . . Eventually, all my friends' eyes began to glaze over when I started talking this way, and I got the hint that there might be something comical in it.