Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.
Interpretation
Playwriting represents a pure expression of individual creativity, flourishing in an environment that often shuns commercial gain.
In this quote, John Patrick Shanley highlights the unique position of playwriting as a form of art that allows writers to express their individual voices and perspectives. He contrasts the world of playwriting with other forms of writing where monetary gain often influences content, suggesting that true individualism can thrive in the relatively less lucrative field of theater, where artists can take risks and innovate without the pressure of conforming to popular consensus.
In practice
In a speech at a local theater festival, one might quote this to underscore the value of artistic integrity.
I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap.
I think that certainty is a closed door, It's the end of the conversation. Doubt is an open door.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.
Whether the psychological effect of color is direct...or whether it is the outcome of association, is open to question. The soul being one with the body, it may well be possible that a psychological tremor generates corresponding one through association.
Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems.
There aren't that many things left that haven't already been done, especially with music. I'm interested in ideas that can shake us all up.
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