To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That’s why I write about art. – Terry Teachout
At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction. – Terry Teachout
You’ve probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike. – Terry Teachout
No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It’s a more serious piece. Yet every bar of ‘Appalachian Spring’ is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible – great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing. – Terry Teachout
Does film music really matter to the average moviegoer? A great score, after all, can’t save a bad film, and a bad score – so it’s said – can’t sink a good one. – Terry Teachout
A playwright who limits himself – or is limited – to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray. – Terry Teachout
In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out. – Terry Teachout
A play is not a play until it’s performed, and unless it’s a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance. – Terry Teachout
The contemporary notion that it’s somehow inherently bad for a film to be ‘talky’ has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood. – Terry Teachout
I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing ‘dumber,’ if what you really mean to say is ‘less culturally literate.’ – Terry Teachout
Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music – including jazz. – Terry Teachout
It’s certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they’re required to learn in school is still too much. – Terry Teachout
I’m not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I’m open to drastic changes that may alter the author’s meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don’t work, then I say so. – Terry Teachout
The only thing that surprised me about ‘Lincoln’ is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that ‘Lincoln’ is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay. – Terry Teachout
Samuel Beckett’s estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written. – Terry Teachout
No, I don’t know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they ‘should’ like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle. – Terry Teachout
Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it. – Terry Teachout
One reason why Shakespeare’s plays remain so popular is that they’re now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor. – Terry Teachout
What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then… it’s gone. – Terry Teachout
The first play I ever saw – I was in junior high school – was a high school production of Noel Coward’s ‘Blithe Spirit,’ which seemed to me absolutely magical. – Terry Teachout
Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers. – Terry Teachout
Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money’s worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill. – Terry Teachout
Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage. – Terry Teachout
There’s a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative. – Terry Teachout
What’s the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was ‘Noises Off,’ but now that I’ve seen ‘The Liar,’ I’m not so sure. – Terry Teachout
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world’s brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. – Terry Teachout
If you’re looking for light entertainment, you can’t get much lighter than ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n’ roll to small-town America. – Terry Teachout
All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves. – Terry Teachout
If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I’m going to run screaming up the aisle. – Terry Teachout
I don’t know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television. – Terry Teachout
