I have a friend who is a very successful writer. Early in his career, he wrote a script that I thought was terrible, and I told him so. That was not easy to do, because he had spent the better part of a year working on it — but it was the truth (as I saw it). Now, when I tell him that I love something he has written, he knows that I love it. He also knows that I respect his talent enough to tell him when I don’t. I am sure there are people in his life he can’t say that about. Why would I want to be one of them? Secrets

My play opens with an actor walking down into the audience, where he strangles the critic, then reads aloud from a little black book all the humiliations he has noted therein. Then he throws up on the audience, after which he exits and puts a bullet through his head.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.

Mademoiselle De Brie: But it can't be much fun seeing your work torn to shreds.

Moliere: What do I care? Didn't I get everything I wanted from my play? I was lucky — it appealed to the distinguished audience I was particularly eager to please. Don't you think I'm right to be happy with how it turned out? Can't you see that their attacks have come too late? It's out of my hands at this point. If people attack a successful play, they're attacking the audience who liked it, for their lack of judgement, not the art of the man who wrote the play, don't you see?

Nothing is a greater obstacle to our progress in knowledge, than a bad performance of a celebrated author; because, before we instruct we must begin with undeceiving.

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.”

[narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers — because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer — still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying — only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.

He who sees a play that is regular, and answerable to the rules of poetry, is pleased with the comic part, informed by the serious, surprised at the variety of accidents, improved by the language, warned by the frauds, instructed by examples, incensed against vice, and enamoured with virtue; for a good play must cause all these emotions in the soul of him that sees it, though he were never so insensible and unpolished.

"I think that every one whom you may ask how to write a play will reply, if he really can write one, that he doesn't know how it is done. It is a little as if you were to ask Romeo what he did to fall in love with Juliet and to make her love him; he would reply that he did not know, that it simply happened.

Well, my dear friend, if you want me to be quite frank, I'll own up that I don't know how to write a play. One day a long time ago, when I was scarcely out of school, I asked my father the same question. He answered: "It's very simple; the first act clear, the last act short, and all the acts interesting.

If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.

the Great Actor, capable of bringing herself to tears, may extort our admiration for her “accomplishment,” but she will never leave us stronger; she has made us pay a price, and made us pretend we like it, but we leave the theatre moved only by our capacity to be moved.

Nevertheless, he was caught in its magic and he understood, what he had not known before, that much of the magic of a great theatrical moment is created by the audience itself, a magic impalpable but vividly present, and that what begins as trickery of lights and paint is enlarged and made fine by the response of the beholders. There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.