Sarah Ruhl Quotations

I will also say that there's a kind of aura around young male writers, say age 26, the hot male writer thing that never surrounds women playwrights. And there's a tremendous irony there, because the playwrights most interesting to read and see now, the ones who are really pushing the work forward aesthetically, are almost all women.

Little is more American than the nexus of religious rhetoric, politics, love and theatricality. At an historical moment when it feels at times as if we are in the midst of a contemporary holy war - where the line between religion and politics has become increasingly blurred - I'm thrilled to premiere this play at Arena Stage, in our nation's political center.

There's kind of a split between the roles people play and who they are in real life,

Role models are huge, ... I started out writing poetry and might never have believed I could have a life as a playwright if Paula Vogel hadn't plucked me out and said 'you can do this for life.'

Any woman who is a playwright is already a feminist.

Being dead is the most airtight defense of one's own aesthetic.

I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

It's a privilege to have kids and not live your life in solitude. But we live in a child-hating culture.

I don't read a word that's written about me. I don't read my own interviews. I don't read reviews. I think it would drive me insane.

I think you have to have your own expectations of yourself and your own sense of purpose and your own intrinsic pleasure in the task. If you don't, you will drive yourself off a cliff because your fortunes will rise and fall, and if you identify too closely with that, you really will go insane.

I see, in women friends, a really dangerous phenomenon where it seems they reach a certain age and become invisible.

I would never be essentialist about sexuality and structure, but I do think there's a way in which this male-arc has been talked about as the only structure, and kind of a stand-in for even the word structure, instead of looking at other forms.

No one likes kids. We say we do, and we take pictures of pregnant women for People Magazine, but really they're commodities - we hate them around, we hate them on airplanes, we consider them a grand imposition and almost a style choice.

I used to paint and I used to draw, and I probably would have loved to have been a portrait painter if I'd been good enough, but I really wasn't good enough.

A multivalent culture is an amazing place to be writing theatre.

Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, "This is what I do and you can do this" is hugely important.

I think theatre is a democratic act and I think writing a play is not a democratic act. I think we should give writers more leeway and space to write the thing they want to write, and then we should produce the play, multiple times, and let them re-write it.

The director was only invented in the nineteenth century. So directors have only been around for 200 year,s and playwrights have been around since Sophocles and Euripides.

I do think there's a relationship between a book and a reader that's more intimate, in many ways, than the relationship between an audience member and a play - just by the nature of it being an object that you can have in bed with you and that you can keep and page through.

We all exist in relation to the world, our partners, the human race.

Attachment parenting is this theory that if you wear your baby around and you sleep with your baby and you breast-feed for a long time, the baby will be more attached to you.

I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we've substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there's one and only one structure.

In America I think it's much more full of disruption culturally; it's much more mysterious how we inherit culture here. We grab it where we can find it - we're insatiable - and there can be a sense here that it's not available to you as readily as it is in other cultures.

What I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.

There's a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime - a whole word for just being sad - about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they're going to die.

I think a person has to believe in something, or search out some kind of faith; otherwise life is empty, nothing. How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky... Either you know why you live, or it's all small, unnecessary bits.

Have you ever been so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved's hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?

It was important to me that people know that you can make plays and raise children at the same time - for other mothers, for other parents, for other women considering having children and who want to be working and thinking and contemplating and making things while they're raising children.

Art is a way of freezing time, or extending time. ... It's another way to bridge the gaps between us.

Theatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a make believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.