Top 60 George C. Wolfe Quotes

I’m convinced whenever something opens on Broadway, it’s a miracle. It’s a miracle that people survived.

The worst thing when you’re working is to say, ‘I have a question,’ and the other person goes, ‘No! This is what it is.’ That kind of rigidity is very challenging because musicals are constantly mutating.

When ‘The Normal Heart’ first appeared, the sense of urgency was so important.

When I came to New York, I told everyone I was a writer/director, and they said, ‘No.’ There was a rule. You could be one or the other. They ordained me writer. But then I won the Obie for directing ‘Spunk,’ and the rules changed.

I want to create a theater that looks, feels, and smells like America.

Our lives are connected in ways we can’t imagine. They’re connected even before we know they’re connected.

My first play, ‘The Colored Museum,’ was done in ’86 at the Public Theater.

I love and I’m intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

I was raised to believe that other people’s suffering was my responsibility.

When you’re writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you’re directing, you’re serving everybody – in the guise of acting like everybody’s serving you. But you’re really serving the materials. You’re serving the actors. You’re in charge, but it’s not free.

There is a real affection for these human beings on these stage that O’Neill really had. Out of that affection comes a lot of humor, which is unexpected when you think of ‘The Iceman Cometh.’

When ‘Jelly’s’ went out on tour, no one really wanted it. It was undersold. And I knew if I gave ‘Noise’ to someone else, they would sell it as ‘Stomp’ with little dancing black boys.

A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.

If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn’t be locked out of the room.

I don’t go, like, ‘Hmm, I’m now going to create something for the black community.’ I just feel this compelling urge. I just feel myself drawn to stories that I feel have a potency and immediacy.

If you love theatre, do theatre wherever you can, because theatre is theatre, and you can experience it anywhere.

I feel like I’m edgy and I’m funny and I got this bite, this outrageousness.

There’s no place more theatrical than history.

I pride myself on being available to as many people’s stories as I possibly can.

A lot of directors tend to manipulate actors’ vulnerability to get what they want, and that can work.

Every single wave, when I was overwhelmed and poor and struggling in New York, there were these extraordinary people in New York who said, ‘Come this way.’

All the things that can happen to an artist regardless of how prepared they are and how smart they are and hard-working they are and attractive – doesn’t matter. There’s always somebody cuter. There just is.

1985 – That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.

Producing has empowered me as an artist in a specific way. It’s forced a certain kind of maturity.

I think we all have a primal desire to know as much as we can to find out about where we come from.

I’ve always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other.

The best of any artist is in their art.

I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’ I was always very fascinated with the people who were on ‘What’s My Line?’ and I always had an incredible obsession with the city.

I like to knock down walls and allow others to enter.

AIDS is a shared truth – it’s not selective in its wrath.

To me, ‘Show Boat’ was the first American musical, the first to have the real texture of this country.

Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it’s a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I’ve tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form.

To want to come to New York, you have to have a sense of wonder about the world and a foolish sense of worth about yourself. And I, too, had both of those things.

I’m interested in exploring how an individual maintains a sense of power in a world that tends to make individuals feel powerless.

You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.

The black experience, which has nothing to do with my play ‘Angels in America,’ allowed me to understand the Mormon character. He was the character that couldn’t come out to his mother. It allowed me to understand emotional and closeted behavior, because you’re so acutely aware of how you’re perceived.

My absolutely favorite time of working on a project is the time I spend not knowing what it is. Because the longer you live inside that period, the likelier you are to discover something new.

Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.

I absolutely love working on musicals, but anytime I finish a project, I want to move on to something completely different.

There is a strange kind of parental pride when ‘Topdog’ ends up on Broadway, or ‘Elaine Stritch.’

It may take a while, but I think ‘On the Town’ has the potential for us to break down the boundaries between the traditional theatergoer who may have fond memories of the musical and those with a ‘Broadway-is-not-for-me’ agenda.

Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are.

I love Kabuki, Noh theater and bunraku.

I feel like I’ve been very blessed in the sense that I’ve had the veracity of spirit to not be stopped and, at the same time, the protective energy and the generosity of those who have come before me, who saw something inside of me and, therefore, invited me into rooms that I would not have been inside of otherwise.

In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they’re next to each other.

With actors, I have very close, intense working relationships with actors in theater.

I came to New York to write and direct, and when I got here, a lot of my rage came out.

Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it’s rhythmic control. You’re crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.

If I hadn’t told stories, I would’ve been a historian.

Theater should address the stories of its communities, or I don’t know why it’s here.

It’s easier to be cynical and edgy and tough rather than overly emotional.

You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.

I’m more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

I viewed black musicals before ‘Jelly’ as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.

There are a lot of people who will tell you I’m very ruthless. I’m very fierce. If I feel I’m right, if I feel I’ve been violated, then I am like a warrior from hell!

The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.

A lot of ’20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.

A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn’t necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.

I love working with actors who will just go, ‘Oh O.K., let’s try it and see where it goes,’ and ‘Let’s see what we can discover.’

The world doesn’t see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.