Steven Berkoff Quotes

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

If you are opening a play, a play that's really about something, a play that's really about ideas, you have to find a way to sell that play.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

Back in 2004, Kellie Overbey handed me her play 'Girl Talk' to read. I fell in love with her brutally delicious humor and the fearlessly deft way in which she drew her characters. They jumped off the page and begged me to give them a space in which to stomp around.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

Acting has always been a way for me to express myself, and show all my vulnerabilities and flaws through my characters.

The thing about Sondheim is that it does get very cerebral. You do need a faculty with words and a love for the lyrics to not just pull it off, but to have an appreciation for it.

Now I can't wait to write my next play.

I've been writing music since 4th grade, and I love putting words together and expressing things in a way that you can move your head to and you can really relate to, because I have a lot to say.

I take the sexy girl parts and try to give them something else and make them a character.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

There's something really exciting about playing someone where you're given license to be unpredictable.

Talking to actors is the same as talking to any other artists; it's getting into the moment for them, and making sure they can lose themselves in the performance!

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

As a writer, I think I'm mainly interested in contemporary themes, so when I create my own stuff, it's inherently that. But as an actor, I would like to do lots of different things. I would love to play someone completely different from myself in a costume drama.

When I write, I just let my characters go, the way I let life go.

What's always intriguing to me is transforming my subjects into a character from another era.

I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.

We are not brain surgeons. We are not curing cancer. We are not finding the next cure for Alzheimer's. We are simply and merely entertainment. We take on and wear the masks of characters. That's what we're paid to do.

Playing Mark Antony in Julius Caesar was the most thrilling thing I've done. You get these speeches that were written for men, and you're running around like an action hero, climbing scaffolding and beating people up. It was very freeing.

I do have shout-outs to bands and musicians I like in my books, but the musical references can be misunderstood. Often, I have people listening to music that I would never listen to personally, because it fits and defines their character.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.