Andrew Coyle Bradley Quotes

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

Shakespeare gives you these clues - these little pieces of gold dust, I call them. They tell you so much about the story, the character, the drive, the intentions. It's like a gift.

I think Shakespeare really got it. He was the first one to introduce psychology to villains and give them a real point of view.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.

I've been doing Shakespeare readings with my friends for years.

I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.

When 'Deadwood' came along, it was totally like Shakespeare. The long speeches were like soliloquies. If one phrase of a monologue was out of whack, the entire one-page speech didn't work.

Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

I would like to do something dark or small. I love independent films. I love emotional scenes. I love people who are struggling with something. I think it's just the juxtaposition to my incredibly happy, positive demeanor.

It's impossible to have a favourite Shakespeare, since so many of the plays rouse and inspire completely different parts of your being.

A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.

I like to ground plays in reality so they can jump higher. So we can account for the trampoline, so we can account for the leap.

I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.

The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.

I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.

'Transparent' was huge for me when I first saw it. I felt that, from an authorial point of view, no one was trying to sell characters to us, you know? It's the idea of not having to adore these characters and want to cuddle them; you just have to be into them and their psychology and be compelled by them.

Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'.

I grew up doing regional Shakespeare, and when Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, there's something about that that you don't really do in film anymore.

The leading character isn't always the most important or interesting character; when people think that the protagonist is the character portrayed, it's people who haven't read Shakespeare.

One of the most fun things for me, as a writer, is when readers ask questions like, 'Oh, I noticed that you have a lot of water and baptism imagery in your book. Did you do that on purpose?'

That's one of the beauties of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim and their work together. They have such a depth to the emotional exploration of the story that they're telling, but there's always a release, and the release is a laugh.

If I am not playing the villain then I'll play the friend, or the brother who dies in the third reel.