Quotes by Richard Foreman

• One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.
• My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.
• I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.
• I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.
• From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything.
• So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.
• All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.
• I've been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky.
• I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.
• It's true, I don't like the real world.
• Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.
• Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.
• Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again.
• There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.
• What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.
• Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.
• You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.
• I'm there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don't like it, I'm very unhappy, but I can't do anything about that.
• If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit.
• As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.