John Guare
John Guare
John Guareis an Irish American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body. His style, which mixes comic invention with an acute sense of the failure of human relations and aspirations, is at once cruel and deeply compassionate. In his foreword to a collection of Guare's plays, film director Louis Malle writes:...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth5 February 1938
CountryUnited States of America
Oh, I never use a seat belt. I don't believe in gravity.
The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril.... The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.
I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?
I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg. I believe in a theater where the director and the playwright work together to create what they need.
The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.
The rich live hand-to-mouth too-just on a higher level.
What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.
You can't kind of take away, you either do or you don't. If you kind of take away something you're a failure.
What we're dealt with hopefully is two arms, two eyes, two legs, a head, a heart. The variations, the extensions, the possibilities of the human body, what that can do
We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?
Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.
You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."
Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.
I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.