Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
General |
The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout. |
Robert | Holman | http://izquotes.com/ |
Acting |
Acting is a very limited form of expression and those who take it seriously are very limited people. I take it seriously. |
Judy | Holliday | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/judyhollid227986.html |
Playwriting |
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. |
Alfred | Hitchcock | |
General |
This is an extremely foolish and stupid and idiotic kind of attitude--to expect theatres to make money. Do the public schools make money? Do libraries make money? Does the zoo make money? Do the sewers make money? It's a community service. |
John | Hirsch | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
General |
The world's a theater, the earth a stage, |
Thomas | Heywood | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Playwriting |
Drama should not present new stories but new relationships. |
Frederick | Hessel | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
You're an actor, are you? Well, all that means is: you are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and incapable of handling an adult emotion or a universal concept without first reducing it to something personal, material, sensational -- and probably sexual. |
George | Herman | |
Acting |
What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin. |
Katherine | Hepburn | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four. |
Katherine | Hepburn | http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/acting |
Playwriting |
But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. If I write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don't have to be very smart. |
Beth | Henley | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/beth_henley.html |
Playwriting |
Failure in the theatre is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty. |
Lillian | Hellman | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Playwriting |
I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced--although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world--what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done. |
Lillian | Hellman | Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater |
Acting |
A cat actually thinks visibly. If you watch him jump on a shelf, the wish to jump and the action of jumping are one and the same thing... It's in exactly the same way that all Brook's exercises try to train the actor. The actor is trained to become so organically related within himself, he thinks completely with his body. He becomes one sensitive, responding whole... The whole of him is one. |
John | Heilpern | |
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 | |
Acting |
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. |
William | Hazlitt | |
Set Design |
A ground plan is important in terms of its rigor. If your plan is soggy and weak, your production will be soggy and weak. |
David | Hays | http://www.emerson.edu/emersontoday/index.cfm?action=3&articleID=678&editionID=45 |
Acting |
Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness. |
Helen | Hayes | |
Acting |
Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end. |
Helen | Hayes | |
Acting |
The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life. |
Helen | Hayes | |
Playwriting |
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising. |
Vaclav | Havel | |
Set Design |
My process is that I will read the play a couple of times and then not do anything until I've spoken with the director, because, of course, there are 500 different ways a play can look--and still honor every word that's in those stage directions. I don't want to think about how it works until I know what the director is interested in, and if the playwright is around, what they're thinking about as they've written it. Then I go away and do my research. |
Rachel | Hauck | Interview with the set designer in Stage Directions magazine, August 2019 |
Playwriting |
One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty quick. |
Moss | Hart | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
General |
Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own. |
Moss | Hart | |
Acting, General |
God comes to us in theater [in] the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity. |
Julie | Harris | Christian Science Monitor 15 May 79 |
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 | |
Acting |
Good actors are good because of the things they can tell us without talking. When they are talking they are the slaves of the dramatist. It is what they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor. |
Cedric | Hardwicke | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Musical Theatre |
I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices. But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly. I think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn't write anything without hope in it. |
Oscar | Hammerstein | |
General |
The number of people who will not go to a show they do not want to see is unlimited. |
Oscar | Hammerstein | |
Acting, Shakespeare |
Has anyone understood that the basic thing about Elizabethan theatre is that it was played in daylight? The actor saw the eyes of the audience. |
Peter | Hall | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Backstage |
Perhaps, therefore, ideal stage managers not only need to be calm and meticulous professionals who know their craft, but masochists who feel pride in rising above impossible odds. |
Peter | Hall | |
Costumes |
Before a character even speaks, we 'read' their appearance through their costume. |
Peter Ruthven | Hall | http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/events.htm |
Set Design |
Designers play with scale and proportion, making the ordinary extraordinary by taking an object out of context and changing its scale in relation to the characters' size and appearance. |
Peter Ruthven | Hall | http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/events.htm |
Set Design |
Everything placed in the performance space, with the characters, creates a context for their story. |
Peter Ruthven | Hall | http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/events.htm |
Playwriting |
Playwrights must be allowed to be at less than their best sometimes, without meeting an all-out critical assault. |
Peter | Hall | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
Acting |
I don't possess a lot of self-confidence. I'm an actor so I simply act confident every time I hit the stage. I am consumed with the fear of failing. Reaching deep down and finding confidence has made all my dreams come true. |
Arsenio | Hall | |
Acting, Directing, General, Playwriting |
You need three things in the theatre -- the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something. |
Kenneth | Haigh | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
Acting |
Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
I think, by and large, the level of acting is mediocre. When I go to the theatre, I get so angry. I don't go. |
Uta | Hagen | http://www.brainyquote.com |
Acting |
Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often. |
Uta | Hagen | http://www.brainyquote.com |
Acting |
I'm a bad liar; I don't know what to say backstage. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most. |
Uta | Hagen | |
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, Shakespeare |
Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' ---the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity. |
Alec | Guinness | My Name Escapes Me, 1996 |
Acting |
An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents |
Alec | Guinness | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
Acting, Directing, General |
It is not theatre that is indispensable, but something quite different. To cross the frontiers between you and me. |
Jerzy | Grotowski | |
Management |
A statement of vision is the overarching purpose, the big dream, the visionary concept--something presently out of reach--so stated that it excites the imagination and chlalenges people to work for something they do not yet know how to do. |
Robert | Greenleaf | Servant Leadership |
Shakespeare |
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good. |
Robert | Graves | Robert Graves (1895 - 1985) |
Acting, Directing, General |
Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. |
Martha | Graham | Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance, by Roger Copeland (Routledge Books) |
Fundraising |
In good times and bad, we know that people give because you meet needs, not because you have needs. |
Kay | Grace | http://www.museummarketingtips.com/quotes/giving.html |
Acting |
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;/ 'Twas only that when he was off he was acting. |
Oliver | Goldsmith | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Directing, Musical Theatre |
Seen from the point of view of the composer, the most nonsensical practice is that of casting people in musicals who are unable to sing. No one would cast a dancing part with someone who cannot dance sufficiently to come up to professional standards. The same is true of acting. But when it comes to singing, more often than not it is amateur night. . . . Either musicals should be written for specified performers in the first place, or they should be cast with people who are adequate to its dancing, acting and singing demands. |
Ernest | Gold | Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater |
Acting |
Never get caught acting. |
Lillian | Gish | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Directing, General, Playwriting |
The stage play is a trial, not a deed of violence. The soul is opened, like the combination of a safe, by means of a word. You don't require an acetylene torch. |
Jean | Giradoux | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
Acting |
Being another character is more interesting than being yourself. |
John | Gielgud | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself. |
John | Gielgud | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Directing |
It is very hard to cast a number of plays adequately from the same company of actors without several parts being miscast. |
John | Gielgud | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
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 | |
Lighting |
If I am so insistent about the bright lights, both the stage and house lights, it is because I should in some way like both actors and audience to be caught up n the same illumination, and for there to be no place for them to hide, or even half-hide. |
Jean | Genet | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
General, Musical Theatre, Playwriting |
If Hitler's still alive, I hope he's out of town with a musical. [variously attributed] |
Larry | Gelbart | http://povonline.com/Hitler%20Line.htm |