Top 17 Israel Horovitz Quotes

My agent in London says all New York films are wonderful if they’re really New York films because they’re like travelogues.

Theatre’s great. It’s such an act of faith. It’s a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It’s a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That’s why I love the theatre.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There’s a need to get a certain thing down.

Maybe all theatre is going to be irrelevant for all time.

If work isn’t rooted in comedy, people will turn from it, or they’ll use it like soap opera.

It’s one of the terrors of old age that your body is not your friend. Or to be out on the street and be frightened of someone because you’re not in good shape and can’t do anything about it.

France is very welcoming to foreign writers.

I am an internationally produced playwright.

I’ve done nothing with my life but write plays.

I began coming to Paris in the 1960s when I was told audiences here liked my work. More than 20 of my plays have been produced in Paris, and several have had long runs and have returned in revivals.

Gloucester’s not some chi-chi tourist town. It’s a working-class seaport: a no-kidding-around down-and-dirty place.

I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. Cohen. We would drive down the highway to meet his car, and Jewish boys from these Massachusetts towns would sit in his car and learn the lessons.

I felt no need to write a German-bashing play.

L.A. is so focused on TV and film that theater is kind of an arcane sport. People look at you like you’re doing something cute.

The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times.

I write because I don’t know how to ask my questions any other way.

I grew up in Wakefield, Mass., and there were only a couple of Jewish families in the town.