Top 40 Martin McDonagh Quotes

I’ve always been very honest about what’s good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.

The fact that ticket prices are way too expensive, and there’s only one bunch of people going to see Broadway shows, is something I’ve never liked.

I’ve learned not to be such a show-off and to have a bit more empathy with humanity. Or at least to fake that.

I can’t stand up in front of people. It just fills me with horror.

I never really tell anyone what I’m writing beforehand because I usually don’t know what it will be.

Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn’t write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.

I’ve got a fondness for rabbits.

My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They’re down and dirty, real and more fun.

I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We’re all cruel, aren’t we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that’s what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.

I guess I’ve accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It’s too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.

I’m not really into the fame side of things, so I’m very happy with making a film every four years or so.

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it’s always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude.

It’s like two years straight out of your life doing a film. It’s very enjoyable, especially working with the guys, but I kind of like the idea of traveling and growing, and developing as a writer and as a filmmaker.

I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.

I don’t feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don’t feel either. And, in another way, of course, I’m both.

I fell into the theatre because I felt I was doing it well, and I stuck to it for the same reason.

My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I’ve never been to.

There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That’s where the real art lies. See, I always suspect characters who are painted as lovely, decent human beings. I would always question where the darkness lies.

Dublin people think they are the center of the world and the center of Ireland. And they don’t realize that people have to leave Ireland to get work, and they look down on people who do.

I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I’m happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.

I think if you’re writing a play, it should be its own end game; you’ll never get to do a good one unless you know it’s not a blueprint for a film; you’re not going to get the action right and the story right.

I pick and choose what I want to do at any given time, and what not to do, importantly. My agents, I won’t hear about any offers or options.

I can go anywhere. In fact, for ‘Three Billboards,’ I was just getting on trains around America. I wrote everywhere from New York to New Mexico. I always write with pencil and paper.

Everything went perfectly on ‘In Bruges.’ It was constant warfare, but I won all the battles and was really happy working with the actors and everything on the film.

I never lie in interviews.

I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one!

When you’ve got good actors, they’re going to come up with good stuff, but you’re never quite sure how the dynamics are going to work between them.

When I started out, I was very vociferously against theatre or what I saw theatre as being, so I tried to make my plays the opposite of that – something a bit more cinematic. I’m a film kid, so I’ll never have the same love of theatre as I do of movies. It’s just the way I was brought up.

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

I went to Bruges for a weekend away from London. I was supposed to be meeting a girl there the next day. It was a tentative arrangement. From the moment I saw the town, I thought, ‘This place is just so cinematic, so gorgeous.’ Every corner seemed to offer a new image.

I don’t find it easy for me to talk about me.

I loved ‘The Master’ a lot. I’m not going to get to work with Daniel Day-Lewis, but Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best around, I think.

With a stage play, they can’t cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.

When I heard the Pogues, I connected with the songs immediately, but it was also the first time I didn’t reject out of hand the kind of music that my parents had always tried to push on to us when we were growing up.

Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I’ve written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.

I think as a writer you never have to flee from fame because you’re not that visible in the first place, but, after the Broadway success of ‘Beauty Queen,’ people were coming up to me all the time, and I wasn’t really prepared for that level of attention.

‘Beauty Queen’ will always be a favourite because I think it’s a really tight play, and when it’s done right, there is a sadness to it that I love.

I realize that I am never going to grow up.

I probably haven’t had enough gay characters in my stuff. When you’re writing something, you’re thinking, ‘Why couldn’t this person be black, white, gay?’