Tracy Letts Quotes

Sometimes my family thinks I've made my childhood a bit more Dickensian than it was, and it probably wasn't all that bad. But I was uncomfortable as a kid.

You get to know a character that you play on-stage in a pretty profound way over a length of time. I don't want to sound highfalutin and say you become the character, you just start bringing more and more of yourself to the part until the character and actor, it's hard to tell them apart. It's some weird amalgam. In film, because of the period of time, I don't know that you ever get that deep into it.

A certain giving up of control is good for the soul.

I never know what the hell I'm writing about, I never know what the next thing I'm writing about is, I never have a plan.

Divorce is an embarrassing public admission of defeat.

What they frequently want to do with a movie is, they want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks. And valleys are important; the valleys make the peaks stand out.

Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.

You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.

I said to my wife just the other day, I was actually taking some time to consider all the blessings in my life and that things are really good. I said, you would have to be a real churl to complain about the life I'm living right now. Everything's going great. I'm having a good time.

My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.

I mean there’s a certain finality about a movie, when it’s done it’s done – that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There’s a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can’t do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participateI respond to heat. And blood. And humanity. The cold experience is not for me. I’ve always enjoyed all the real people in a room together in the theatre.

We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more.

If you're not entertaining, what the hell's the point?

If you feel like you're in control of everything, and then things aren't going well, you feel like you're failing.

I don't know what it says about me that I have a greater affinity with the damaged. Probably nothing good.

I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.

I'm aware that a film is different than a play, and that a film isn't going to be the filmed record of the play. It's its own separate entity, and I've come to peace with that.

I like Shakespeare, but I never know what the hell is going on.

Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.

All women need makeup. Don't let anybody tell you different. The only woman who was pretty enough to go without makeup was Elizabeth Taylor and she wore a ton.

I don't think I'd give advice. That never pays off. That's always a bad idea. If they follow your advice and it doesn't work out, or if they don't follow your advice, somehow you're on the hook for it.

Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't - like me right now - people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.

Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.

The window shades have all been removed. Nighttime is now free to encroach.

Time wounds all heals.

In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.