David Ives Quotes

I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.

Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

Learning to write for the theatre is learning to be a human being, because the theatre by its very nature makes you deal with other human beings.

Ultimately one has to pity these poor souls who know every secret about writing, directing, designing, producing, and acting but are stuck in those miserable day jobs writing reviews. Will somebody help them, please?

With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

All reviews should carry a Surgeon General's warning. The good ones turn your head, the bad ones break your heart.

Lists are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small.

I have been approached now and again about sitcoms, but, with very few exceptions, one simply needs to move to L.A. for at least a year or two these days if one wants to develop a series - which is what writing a pilot means. I've also been approached about writing episodes for sitcoms, but in order to do that one actually has to watch sitcoms. . . . Life's too short for television, and I don't what it on my actual gravestone, HE STARED AT A BOX FOR 10,000 HOURS.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft.