Theatre Quotes

Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.

A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.

Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.

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.

Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.

When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you!

First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

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.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

It's not enough to have talent, you have to have a talent for your talent.

All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Acting is experience with something sweet behind it.

It is not theatre that is indispensable, but something quite different. To cross the frontiers between you and me.

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.

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.

The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

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.

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.

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.

It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.

The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.

To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.

If Hitler's still alive, I hope he's out of town with a musical. [variously attributed]

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.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

The world's a theater, the earth a stage,
Which God and Nature do with actors fill.

I will accept anything in the theatre . . . provided it amuses or moves me. But if it does neither, I want to go home.

Look, I'm over 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater - you do the math!