Beth Henley Quotes
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My fault now is making my plays too short.
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I love writing for the screen.
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But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
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Plays are so much more special if they've never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each production.
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It's called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn't realize what a rage I was in.
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I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.
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Part of that is that New York has proved to be too much fun for me to live and work; I love New York so much.
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The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your play.
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What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn't you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.
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Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct.
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Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.
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The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field, which at that point was being an actress.
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That's what I like about [smoking] . . . taking a drag off of death, Mmm! Gives me a sense of controlling my own destiny. What power! What exhilaration! Want a drag?
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In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class.
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There are probably brilliant people, geniuses, alive today who don't even know how to say, "Hello, how do you do?" because their minds are absorbed with electronic images.
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The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.
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It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
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I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.
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I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles.
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I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.
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But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don't have to be very smart.
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My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana.
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I tried to start a theatre in LA and failed miserably, but I was probably not meant to raise money.
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I find it fascinating to think about what the world is going to be like when people won't talk anymore.
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That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you'll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed.
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I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I'd rather write plays.
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And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won't have to bother doing it themselves.
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It's really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don't get in trouble.
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I'm very into the first production of the show.
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