John Lahr Quotes
A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.
Quotes to Explore
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I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'
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The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.
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The sad thing is that apparently if you want to become the next Premier or the leader, suddenly you've got to shut down your human side.
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Being listened to and being heard is an experience that doesn't happen terribly often. To listen compassionately or nonjudgmentally to another person - not to get too heavy about it - but I once heard somebody say that was a form of real prayer.
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There's book smart, there is street smart, there's relationship smart, there's too many different kinds of smarts to know all of them. Everybody doesn't know every kind of smart. There's money smart, there's movie smart, there's computer smart. There's just too many different kinds of smarts for people to know all the smarts.
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Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
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Benazir Bhutto was an inspirational leader and an inspirational woman.
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After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract.
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I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.
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The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
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I've always been fascinated by the brain. I wrote a lot about brain-tech in my first non-fiction book, 'More Than Human.' So when I decided to write science fiction, that was the technology I gravitated towards.
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Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.
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Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
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I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
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I was a top-notch cartoon model for Hanna Barbera, and they made me into a cartoon series called 'Devlin,' which ran for seven years, and I was on lunch pails and coloring books and all of that. It's really interesting being a coloring book when you're young – most kids colored in coloring books, but I made money off coloring books.
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Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.
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If you want to bring down the prices of healthcare and education, the answer will be more innovation, more technology, which will then have the effect of freaking everybody out and saying, 'Oh, my God, you're going to kill all the jobs.'
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While I'm writing, I'm also the first reader, and I want to write a book where I'm excited about what happens next.
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Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.
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What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?
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I hate auditions - when I'm doing them, I can't wait to get out the bleeding door.
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That's the big mistake the environmental movement made - 'We'll scare the hell out of you, and you'll become an activist'.
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Magic speaks to the child in all of us. No matter how sophisticated we become, there's still a part of us who wants to believe in an alternative reality, where we can defy the laws of nature.
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A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.
