Tracy Letts Quotations

It's not a natural translation, transition, to take something from stage to screen. Onstage your action is communicated through the spoken word primarily, and on screen it's communicated through pictures. So it's always been kind of unnatural to take something that lives on the stage and turn it into moving pictures.

One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.

After the success of 'August,' there were people saying I should change my life. And maybe I should have bought a yacht and traveled the world instead of returning to Steppenwolf to act in and write plays. But I'm from the Midwest, and that's what we do: We go back to work.

I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'

In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors.

The nature of the beast is that film is a director's medium. It's not a Tracy Letts play, it's a John Wells film. 'August: Osage County,' as a play, is done. Written. On the shelf. It'll be performed in its entirety for years.

When books and plays are made into movies, they frequently want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks.

I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true!

I like it when actors get an opportunity to chew into something. They love scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends - scenes that give an arc to their characters and allow audiences to get to know these people.

I try to write fun - though difficult and challenging - things for actors to do, because I know if they're having fun, they're going to give it everything they got.

I'm not a fan - this is a personal preference - I'm not a fan of tour-de-force writing. I admire it, but it's not where my inclination is. I want to hide.

'Killer Joe' provides a lot of red meat for the theater. Pam MacKinnon is the perfect director to shepherd a group of actors who share a certain bloodlust.

Some people do stage and film. Some people are film actors, and some people are stage actors. I'm quite sure that any of the actors who did the original production of 'August' could have done the film of 'August.' I don't think any of them were particularly surprised when they didn't wind up doing the film.

When I write a play, and we read it for the first time, the great fear is that everybody is going to say, 'You're a bum and you can't write. This stinks.' and throw the script in the garbage. The great hope is that they're all going to lift me up on their shoulders and carry me to the streets, singing, 'He's a genius, he's a genius!'

The way we tell our stories on stage is that we use spoken word to convey action, and in movies, we use visual images to convey action.

You don't work as hard to watch a movie. You work harder to watch a play, so what the audience puts into it is interesting.

'Killer Joe' was originally written in 1991 and first produced in '93 at the Next Theater's Lab - a 40 seat black box theater in Evanston, Illinois - back when I was getting started. I was just 25 and I had been acting for awhile, but it was my first play and the one that really got me noticed, especially by Steppenwolf.

I don't have a great face for camera.

I don't write plays for them to be turned into movies.

I'm just a Chicago actor who's a playwright. Even with the success of 'August,' the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they've seen me onstage so much.

I said to my wife just the other day, I was actually taking some time to consider all the blessings in my life and that things are really good. I said, you would have to be a real churl to complain about the life I'm living right now. Everything's going great. I'm having a good time.

I'm aware that a film is different than a play, and that a film isn't going to be the filmed record of the play. It's its own separate entity, and I've come to peace with that.

Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.

The window shades have all been removed. Nighttime is now free to encroach.

Divorce is an embarrassing public admission of defeat.

Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.

Time wounds all heals.

We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more.

My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.

What they frequently want to do with a movie is, they want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks. And valleys are important; the valleys make the peaks stand out.

I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.

I never know what the hell I'm writing about, I never know what the next thing I'm writing about is, I never have a plan.

You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.

If you feel like you're in control of everything, and then things aren't going well, you feel like you're failing.

I like Shakespeare, but I never know what the hell is going on.

I don't know what it says about me that I have a greater affinity with the damaged. Probably nothing good.

Sometimes my family thinks I've made my childhood a bit more Dickensian than it was, and it probably wasn't all that bad. But I was uncomfortable as a kid.

A certain giving up of control is good for the soul.

If you're not entertaining, what the hell's the point?

Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't -- like me right now -- people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.

I mean there’s a certain finality about a movie, when it’s done it’s done – that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There’s a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can’t do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participateI respond to heat. And blood. And humanity. The cold experience is not for me. I’ve always enjoyed all the real people in a room together in the theatre.

Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.

All women need makeup. Don't let anybody tell you different. The only woman who was pretty enough to go without makeup was Elizabeth Taylor and she wore a ton.