"A play is a journey you take alone first, then with our collaborators, and ultimately with an audience. By the time this final passenger steps on board, your journey is in some sense over, while theirs is just beginning."
- Stuart Spencer

Four conditions of playwrighting according to Thornton Wilder:
1. The theatre is an art which reposes upon the work of many collaborators.
2. It is addressed to the group-mind.
3. It is based upon a pretense and its very nature calls out a multiplication of pretenses.
4. It's action takes place in a perpetual present time.
Quoted in American Playwrights on Drama edited by Horst Frenz

"An audience pays to see a play, they expect it to give them a satisfying emotional experience. Success or failure in this is the criterion of good or bad playwriting. The spectator is always right."
- Raymond Hull

"A play combines all the elements of story-line, suspense, spectacle and language to arouse an emotional response in the audience – laughter, tears, pity, indignation, etc., – but finally, and most importantly a release of those emotions. …In that manipulation of events and characters to produce an effect on the audience lies the at of playwriting. Never underrate your audience. The audience is the playwright's ultimate reason for existing. Writing a play without considering the audience is like shooting arrows without a target – useful as exercise maybe, but in the last analysis pointless."
Becoming a Playwright by David Campton

"A play is like life with all of the boring bits taken out." Alfred Hitchcock

"Theater takes place in that space—the mind, the senses, the imagination—between the stage and the audience. … Theater is a collective conspiracy on the part of the players and the audience. The audience 'suspends its disbelief' for the duration of the performance."
The Art & Craft of Playwriting by Jeffery Hatcher

Elements of Drama:
- action or plot
-character
-thought or ideas
- language, diction or verbal expression
- music or song
- spectacle, image or visual adornment
from Poetics by Aristotle

For complete text see Aristotle's Poetics