George C. Wolfe Quotes

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George C. Wolfe

Profession : Playwright

Birth : September 23, 1954

Surviving failure is one thing. Surviving success is... is challenging, with the consequences and what you lose along the way.

George C. Wolfe

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

George C. Wolfe

AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.

George C. Wolfe

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

George C. Wolfe

The rules I sort of live by for my theater career, which I hope to live for my film career, is that if there's something that intrigues me or fascinates me, or I don't know how to do it, then I should do it.

George C. Wolfe

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.

George C. Wolfe

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.

George C. Wolfe

Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.

George C. Wolfe

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.

George C. Wolfe

I'm the most democratic fascist you'll ever meet. I listen to everybody, and then I make a decision.

George C. Wolfe

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

George C. Wolfe

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.

George C. Wolfe

Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.

George C. Wolfe

As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.

George C. Wolfe

I personally am a very big fan of 'Romeo + Juliet.' It had a visceral power to it that I thought was just exhilarating. It was a very arresting and very disturbing and deeply compelling version of the play.

George C. Wolfe

Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess!

George C. Wolfe

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

George C. Wolfe

I love Kabuki, Noh theater and bunraku.

George C. Wolfe

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

George C. Wolfe

When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.

George C. Wolfe