Israel Horovitz Quotations

I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.

The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times.

Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.

Maybe all theatre is going to be irrelevant for all time.

I've always been a fighter - it's always been a part of my personality.

It's not unusual for people to like Florida in the winter. I'm not a great tourist. I like coming down to work.

I began coming to Paris in the 1960s when I was told audiences here liked my work. More than 20 of my plays have been produced in Paris, and several have had long runs and have returned in revivals.

Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre.

I have a visceral response to a memory of working-class life.

I have seen dozens upon dozens of productions of 'Lebensraum' in dozens of languages around the globe.

I write because I don't know how to ask my questions any other way.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.

I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. Cohen. We would drive down the highway to meet his car, and Jewish boys from these Massachusetts towns would sit in his car and learn the lessons.

It's one of the terrors of old age that your body is not your friend. Or to be out on the street and be frightened of someone because you're not in good shape and can't do anything about it.

Gloucester's not some chi-chi tourist town. It's a working-class seaport: a no-kidding-around down-and-dirty place.

I felt no need to write a German-bashing play.

I grew up in Wakefield, Mass., and there were only a couple of Jewish families in the town.

I'm really into the irony of writing vaguely radical plays that instantly win huge establishment awards. It's really amusing.

I've done nothing with my life but write plays.

If work isn't rooted in comedy, people will turn from it, or they'll use it like soap opera.

My agent in London says all New York films are wonderful if they're really New York films because they're like travelogues.

My dream is to have a small company in France.

People expect someone with the name 'Israel Horovitz' to be a little old man with sideburns carrying a Torah.

What Lou Tyrrell creates when he has a theater is a birthing center for new plays.

L.A. is so focused on TV and film that theater is kind of an arcane sport. People look at you like you're doing something cute.

You simply can't make someone love you if they don't. You must choose someone who already loves you. If you choose someone who does not love you, this is the sort of love you must want.

Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

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.