I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.
BETH HENLEYAnd all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won’t have to bother doing it themselves.
More Beth Henley Quotes
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The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.
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That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you’ll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed.
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The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your play.
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I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.
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And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won’t have to bother doing it themselves.
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I love writing for the screen.
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But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn’t a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don’t have to be very smart.
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I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.
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I tried to start a theatre in LA and failed miserably, but I was probably not meant to raise money.
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I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles.
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I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I’d rather write plays.
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In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class.
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Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct.
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But here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
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There are probably brilliant people, geniuses, alive today who don’t even know how to say, “Hello, how do you do?” because their minds are absorbed with electronic images.
BETH HENLEY