A biography for Theresa Rebeckhasn’t been written yet.
“I'm actually interested in poor behavior. I'm interested in what drives people to poor behavior.”
“I remember when I was at Brandeis, Geoffrey Wolff, he was a great fiction-writing teacher. He was the writer-in-residence, and for those of us who wanted to be writers, you were so excited to be in the same hallway as him.”
“I like to write. Prolific is part of who I am.”
“The movies are all about visual, and television is all about character and dialogue.”
“Our distorted media culture sees men as subjects and women as objects; in films, Woody Allen gets older and older and still dates 20-year-old babes; movies about women are called 'chick flicks,' and men make fun of them.”
“I have spent my whole life working in the theater, and most of the people I know have done the same. And we are pretty interesting people.”
“You have to respect who the character is. It has its own internal truth, and you can't betray that. And if you don't betray that, it will not betray you.”
“It's so funny, I'm always stealing from Moliere, and nobody ever notices. I steal from him willy-nilly.”
“The stage gives you more control over your own work; in television, there's a distressing amount of communal writing. Unless it's your show, you have no control over that. You're at the mercy of whoever's running the show.”
“Moliere and Arthur Miller affected me at a very young age. In adulthood, I became overwhelmed by Chekhov. Those are my big theatrical influences.”
“Obviously, a theatrical masterpiece needs more than a plot; many television shows are nothing but plot, and it is doubtful that they will stand the test of time. But I also don't think that making fun of plot or acting like we're all somehow 'above' structure is such a good idea.”
“Theater is a public space. It is a spectacular space. It is a gathering place.”
“When I was a staff writer on 'NYPD Blue,' it was truly my job to hear David Milch's voice for that show and to deliver episodes that embodied that voice.”
“Rarely do I try to pull a creature out of life and make it a character.”
“I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.”
“There's a thing that happens to Midwesterners - we spend a lot of time talking about having a different set of rules about manners. I don't know about ethics, but certainly about manners, what you would say and what you wouldn't say. And that is not very East coast.”
“I let action rise out of character, really.”
“The audience just doesn't care. They are just as interested in women-centric stories as they are in stories about men.”
“Sometimes I feel that my job on earth is to put Julie White through horrible things, watch her writhe and then recover.”
“The economics of theater are painful. I still think that the theater community should be looking much more rigorously at how to let the playwright keep the money they make.”