John Patrick Shanley Quotations

When I finally went to Ireland, I had to go. It was 1993. My father was finally too old to travel alone, and he asked me to take him home. When an old man asks you to take him home, you have to do it.

When I visited Ireland with my father and heard the people on the farm talking, I couldn't believe the gift of language they had. I felt very untalented.

Some actors are brilliant in David Mamet, but they would crash and burn in my plays and visa-versa. You either have my music in your body, or you don't.

I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in it.

I did 'Doubt' as a film, a play and an opera.

I adopted two children, then I got eye disease and five rounds of surgery. I went blind in one eye, then the other eye, and that went on for three or four years. I got very enamored and involved with the theater and did a lot of plays.

I was in the Marine Corps in 1971. The idea 'Where does authority come from?' is fascinating to me. And also, the idea of a chaplain is fascinating to me because it's a man of the cloth in uniform, and it's the uniform of a killing machine. Back when I was in the Corps, when I saw that, I was amazed by it.

I would say that my parents were intermittently proud of me. They couldn't hang onto it, you know? It would come and go, like the flu.

Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.

Women consume, and they must be directed what to consume, or they may identify you as lunch.

There is some level on which this life must occasionally become repugnant and unappetizing to you and you must step back from it. And then you have a new relationship with it, and then you step back into it from a different angle - with a new appetite - and then you find the next leg of your journey.

You have to live in order to have something to write about - you get caught up in moviemaking and celebrities and money, and it's very intoxicating, but it doesn't give you what you need as a writer. You have to do something else for that.

Conscience is the most dangerous thing you possess. If you wake it up, it may destroy you. To live a life of total moral rigor is not necessarily the way to go. It's the path for very few people. Most people need to come up with some kind of middle ground that satisfies their practical, moral, and philosophical esthetic needs.

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.

If you put someone in a room with no script to direct, they're just going to sit there. Writing scripts is the execution for a show. Then the director takes that and hires people. It's like trying to build a house without any bricks. You need a great script.

I have doubts! I have such doubts!

Trying to lead an interesting life, a fruitful life, is a big challenge.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. Thats what writing a screenplay is.

Monogamy is like a 40-watt bulb. It works, but its not enough.

I'd like to thank everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life and everybody who I ever punched or kissed.

Winning the Pulitzer is a really mellow, fabulous thing. You don't sit and wait for them to open an envelope. You already know you won, and you have a nice lunch. Oscars are more stressful. I had to sit for three hours and wait for my category. I had to fly to Los Angeles. For the Pulitzer I just had to go up to Columbia. But, while the president of Columbia gave me the Pulitzer, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck gave me the Oscar, so that was better.

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.

I think that certainty is a closed door, It's the end of the conversation. Doubt is an open door.

Everything is painful, so why not be honest about the pain?

People ask me if I believe in things: in God, in astrology, and I say, absolutely! I believe in everything! And I believe in its opposite. Like the positive and negative volts on a battery, you need both for power.

Theatre is the safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done.

Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite – it is a passionate exercise. You may come out of my play uncertain. You may want to be sure. Look down on that feeling. We’ve got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word. That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.

Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.

There are people who...tell you that the light in your heart is a weakness. Don't believe it! It's an old tactic of cruel people to kill kindness in the name of virtue.

Where the terror is, you must go.

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!

I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap.

Choose Life over the other stuff. Get out of your head. Live. Dress up. Eat. Touch people. Help out. Give up. Love people. Give your best away. There’s more. What’s the problem? Relax. You’re going to die. Throw a party. Eat off my plate. Sing to me. Meet me in the bedroom. Get a massage. Give one. Let your amazement out into the room. Pry open the box you hide your joy in. Be a poem.