Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Acting, Musical Theatre |
A lot of the actresses who have had most impact in musicals have been character actresses. And character is an essential ingredient of the best shows. In Merrily We Roll Along, for instance, I got to play a character with such a marvellous span - from boozy, fat, cynical 45-year-old to an 18-year-old in love with life ... I'd rather see her [Dame Judi Dench] do a musical than anyone with 10 times the voice. |
Samantha | Spiro | London Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 25.3.01 |
General |
The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. |
Samuel | Johnson | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
The appearance and retirement of actors are the great events of the theatrical world; and their first performances fill the pit with conjecture and prognostication, as the first actions of a new monarch agitate nations with hope and fear. |
Samuel | Johnson | |
Acting |
When you go into the professional world, at a stock theater somewhere, backstage you will meet an older actor--someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes about life in the theater. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man. |
Sanford | Meisner | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
You can't learn to act unless you're criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you'll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you're doing and trust it because it's out of you. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don't have it don't bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can't fake emotion. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Playwriting |
I haven't really written my plays and books -- I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood. |
Sebastian | Barry | |
Acting |
Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live. |
Shelley | Winters | |
Acting |
We've put a man on the moon. If you miss a cue, no one will die. |
Shelli | Aderman | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html |
Acting |
Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is fifty percent of the performance. |
Shirley | Booth | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
General |
January, month of empty pockets! Let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead. |
Sidonie | Gabrielle | |
Acting |
Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture. |
Spencer | Tracy | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Don't use your conscious past, use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck with your own life. It's too little. |
Stella | Adler | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting, Directing |
The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays. |
Stella | Adler | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
It's not enough to have talent, you have to have a talent for your talent. |
Stella | Adler | |
General |
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
A nonprofessional theatre is, simply, one comprised of people who do not derive their income from it and do not spend most of their time engaged in it. There are two distinct categories: (1) nonprofessional groups that present plays with some regularity; and (2) nonprofessional groups that are organized on a one-time basis to present a play or a show for some special purpose. The former represents what is known as community theatre, and the latter falls under the heading of amateur theatre (though both types are amateur, or nonprofessional). |
Stephen | Langley | Theatre Management & Production in America |
General |
You have two kinds of shows on Broadway -- revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is -- a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture. |
Stephen | Sondheim | NY Times 3/12/00 |
Acting |
When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting. |
Steve | Buscemi | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Acting |
If you want to help the American theatre, don't be an actress, be an audience. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Tallulah: My Autobiography |
Playwriting |
It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write. |
Tennessee | Williams | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Playwriting |
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself. |
Tennessee | Williams | http://www.notable-quotes.com/p/playwriting_quotes.html |
Playwriting |
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people, really. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute. |
Terence | Rattigan | |
Playwriting |
No one makes you write plays; the world could sort of get along without me turning out a play every year, so I do this because I enjoy it enormously. It gives me great pleasure, and working in the theatre is, I think its own reward. |
Terrence | McNally | |
Acting, Directing |
You know what's the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence. |
Thelonious | Monk | The Quotable Musician, from Bach to Tupac, by Sheila E. Anderson (Allworth Press) |
General |
The world's a theater, the earth a stage, |
Thomas | Heywood | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Playwriting |
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it. |
Thornton | Wilder | |
General |
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action." |
Thornton | Wilder | |
Playwriting |
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. [A take-off on Oscar Wilde's "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."] |
Tom | Stoppard | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Acting, Directing |
Audiences know what to expect. . . and that is all they are prepared to believe in. |
Tom | Stoppard | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html |