Susan Wiggs Quotes

The history of screenwriting - of what we do - is more than 100 years old. It's thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only - the only - separation for being a dramatist is reading drama.

But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.

After drama school I did a seven-month tour of Europe performing in 'Romeo and Juliet.' I played Romeo.

I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.

Then there's the story of ill-fated love. It's universal.

Romance classically has tragic underpinnings to it.

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.

A comic book and a straight drama all have the same elements. If you're playing tragedy, you have to be aware of the comedy; if you're playing comedy, you have to be aware of the tragedy. If you're playing comic book, you have to be aware of the reality.

'Macbeth' sags in act four - the England scene with Malcolm and Macduff just doesn't work theatrically. But with 'Hamlet,' although the play is so long, Shakespeare manages to sustain the arc.

'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Manon,' 'Giselle' - they are not stupid stories. They have fantastic characters. They have a big package of emotion.

If I were to do a drama again, I would really like to work on a fatal melodrama, like a love that can't be.

The villain in 'Call Me by Your Name' is the tragedy of love - what seems to be part of the deal you sign with someone when you experience an amazing time with them.

I can't not have something attached to like what actually happens in real life. Like I can't do a romantic comedy without there being something where like, in the case of Annie Hathaway's character, her character ends up having Parkinson's, you know? To me, I feel like that's love, you know? Like to me. So every movie has to have that kind of sense of that.

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.

A laughing Lear would be monstrous. Not so a laughing Romeo and Juliet.

Mythology needs heroes and it needs villains, it needs heroes to fail, it needs heroes to struggle.

For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The star-crossed lovers

What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.

A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?

The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy.

I loved the Romeo and Juliet of the whole thing; this forbidden love between these two characters.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. In my mind it’s a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I’ve chosen to follow.

I love William Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That's some serious ghetto expletive. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff.