A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
Mike NicholsRead
That seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote warns against sacrificing genuine experiences for superficial appearances.
Mike Nichols highlights a profound concern about contemporary life, suggesting that people often prioritize how life appears over how it is genuinely experienced. This 'bargaining away' reflects a cultural trend where the value of true fulfillment and authenticity is exchanged for the allure of outward appearances and social validation, thereby diminishing the richness of being truly alive.
Themes
ExperienceAuthenticitySuperficialityLifeBeing Alive
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about living authentically.
More from Mike Nichols
All quotes →There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
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You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
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The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
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I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.
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Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
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