Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Foreman

Foreman’s line reads like a modest self-help confession, but it’s really an artist staking out a hard aesthetic position: the only way forward is to stop pretending you’re speaking from nowhere. “Honest” here isn’t moral purity; it’s spatial and procedural. Where I was. Where I was coming from. What I was trying to do. Three coordinates that turn the romantic myth of inspiration into something closer to stagecraft: locate the speaker, expose the wiring, admit the goal.

That matters coming from Foreman, whose theater has often resisted conventional realism and narrative “relatability.” The subtext is a pushback against the cultural demand that art smooth itself into digestible story. When you make work that can feel abrasive, overdetermined, or deliberately confusing, audiences (and institutions) often suspect you’re being obscure for its own sake. Foreman answers that suspicion by reframing difficulty as accountability. He’s not hiding; he’s insisting on showing the frame.

The phrasing also suggests an ethical friction with the theater’s oldest trick: illusion. Plays routinely ask us to forget the machinery - the lights, the cues, the author’s hand. Foreman’s honesty is a refusal to let craft masquerade as nature. He’s telling you the performance is a constructed event with a situated maker, not a neutral window onto “life.” In an era when authenticity gets marketed as a vibe, Foreman’s version is bluntly unglamorous: name your position, name your lineage, name your intention, then let the audience decide what kind of truth that produces.