John Guare Quotes

It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.

Feydeau's one rule of playwriting: Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B. Knock Knock. Enter Character B.

The great risk is always saying, "how will I communicate what I'm trying to get across to a room full of strangers sitting in the dark watching a stage?"

How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random”.

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril.... The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.

I don't think about taking a risk. I think about how far can I go. How can I make myself. What are the risks I must create.

The rich live hand-to-mouth too-just on a higher level.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

I'm sure there are some good dramaturgs but I've never worked with one.

You don't push the button that says "Now I will write something that resonates in time." You don't know. It's what happens after a play is finished.

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

There's no such thing as a perfect play. Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play.

Everyone talks about America, this great country. You hear, "I'm more patriotic than you are. No, I'm more patriotic!" But how few people know the history of this country and how we came into being. That's the part that just amazed me.

James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

Oh, I never use a seat belt. I don't believe in gravity.

New Orleans was a thrilling place of all kinds of races, it was a dangerous place. It was really and truly the only international city on the continent of North America. There were all different races and everything was celebrated, and it was a place of difference, and everybody was different and it was so odd, the minute that America took over, the minute that the Louisiana territory became part of the United States of America, instantly you were either black or white. There was no nuance. and so a free man of color who could own property was suddenly not allowed to.

Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.

I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.

You can't kind of take away, you either do or you don't. If you kind of take away something you're a failure.

I only do business with the people I do business with. The people I do business with find out I do business with the people I don't do business with.... I can't do business with you.

What we're dealt with hopefully is two arms, two eyes, two legs, a head, a heart. The variations, the extensions, the possibilities of the human body, what that can do

I wanted to be a Bride of Christ but I guess now I'm a young divorcee.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.