Terrence McNally Quotations

Cheating is not the American way. It is small, while we are large. It is cheap, while we are richly endowed. It is destructive, while we are creative. It is doomed to fail, while our gifts and responsibilities call us to achieve. It sabotages trust and weakens the bonds of spirit and humanity, without which we perish.

I like to surprise myself. I've always been attracted to projects where I don't know how they're going to turn out.

I've had wonderful collaborators. They're very different, just as actors are. Working on a show with Nathan Lane is different from working on a show with Chita Rivera. It keeps you on your toes because it's different every time.

I'm of the school 'Write what you know.' You can educate yourself, but the best writing usually comes from the heart.

I may think I have inalienable rights to be alive and happy, but I don't - life is a blessing.

Whenever you think you're writing what other people want to hear from you, and that it'll be commercial, you're doomed to disaster. Writing has to be as truthful and specific as we can make it. The minute we think that we're reaching more people and pleasing them, we get general. And audiences sense that and turn away, shun us.

Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.

In those days, you had to like one or the other. You couldn't like Sutherland AND Callas.

There are so many rules about play writing. I'd have a nervous breakdown if I followed them.

Young people have got to start their own theaters, really. All good theater is a kind of mom-and-pop operation. Start your own theater.