Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Directing, Diversity & Inclusion, General, Management |
Ultimately, in order to have theatre reflect the world as it is, the industry must value the artists that it has historically marginalized, and start by redirecting resources to support these artists’ work and lives—a move that could both make theatre a more inclusive space for both artists and audiences. |
Emilyn | Kowaleski |
"Reimagining A Diverse and Inclusive Theatrical Space," Media Diversity Institute [ https://www.media-diversity.org/reimagining-a-diverse-and-inclusive-thea... ] |
General |
Theater is life, film is art, television is furniture. |
Unknown | ||
Acting |
You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you. |
Ben | Kingsley | |
General |
All the world's a stage. Some of us just have better seats. |
Unknown | ||
Acting |
Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be. You can't be eight times a week without going stark staring mad. You've got to be in control. |
Noel | Coward | |
General, Playwriting |
Theater is so critical because it has always been able to release people from their isolation... The theater is a communal event, church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is just the longings of one heart. |
Marsha | Norman | |
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 | |
General |
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre. |
Antonin | Artaud | |
Playwriting |
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake. |
W.H. | Auden | |
General, Playwriting |
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name. |
Enid | Bagnold | |
General |
The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent. |
Robert | Brustein | |
General, Playwriting |
The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts. |
David | Hare | |
Playwriting |
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising. |
Vaclav | Havel | |
Playwriting |
A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten. |
David | Mamet | |
Playwriting |
A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great. |
Arthur | Miller | |
General, Playwriting |
Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute. |
John | Mortimer | |
Playwriting |
Good drama must be drastic. |
Friedrich | Schlegel | |
Acting, Directing |
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act. |
Orson | Welles | |
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 | |
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, Costumes |
The subjective actress thinks of clothes only as they apply to her; the objective actress thinks of them only as they affect others, as a tool for the job. |
Edith | Head | |
Lighting, Set Design |
When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you! |
Unknown | ||
General |
I don't see why people want new plays all the time. What would happen to concerts if people wanted new music all the time? |
Clive | Barnes | |
Acting, Directing, General |
Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine. |
Brooks | Atksinson | |
Acting |
Acting expresses a part of the self otherwise hidden to the conscious mind. |
Lisa M. | O'Neill | |
Playwriting |
Remember! the word is playwright --W-R-I-G-H-T -- like wheelwright. A play is not so much written as wrought. it's designed and built and shaped; it's carved out. |
Garson | Kanin | |
Acting |
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. |
William | Hazlitt | |
Acting, Directing, General, Playwriting |
The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted. |
Voltaire | ||
Directing, Shakespeare |
The play loses a great deal of its meaning if it is robbed of a magic which springs, not from the glittering tip of a department-store wand, but from the earth, the stones, the very air of the wood; and a magic which is not merely pretty but dark and dangerous. [said of A Midsummer Night's Dream |
Tyrone | Guthrie | |
Acting |
The secret of staying fresh in a show is to remember that the audience you're playing for that night has never seen it before. |
Danny | Kaye | |
Acting |
What is the main problem of the actor? It is to keep the audience awake, and not let them go to sleep, then wake up and go home feeling they've wasted their money. |
Laurence | Olivier | |
Acting |
It isn't what I do, but how I do it. It isn't what I say but how I say it - and how I look when I do and say it. |
Mae | West | |
General |
It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack. |
Voltaire | ||
Acting, Directing, General |
It is not theatre that is indispensable, but something quite different. To cross the frontiers between you and me. |
Jerzy | Grotowski | |
Acting |
Acting is experience with something sweet behind it. |
Humphrey | Bogart | |
Acting |
One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price. I've never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality. |
Robert | De Niro | |
Acting |
A lot of what acting is paying attention. |
Robert | Redford | |
Acting |
Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant. |
Glenda | Jackson | |
Acting, Directing |
All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real. |
Constantin | Stanislavski | |
Acting |
One mustn't allow acting to be like stockbroker -- you must not take it just as a means of earning a living, to go down every day to do a job of work. The big thing is to combine punctuality, efficiency, good nature, obedience, intelligence, and concentration with an unawareness of what is going to happen next, thus keeping yourself available for excitement. |
John | Gielgud |