Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote | First | Last |
Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | |
| Directing |
This ain't Chekhov, you know! [comment to cast during a rehearsal for "H.M.S. Pinafore"] |
Alan | Stambusky | |
| Acting |
All the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can't be taught. All the great actors can't talk about what they do, and they don't want to begin to talk about it. They just do it. |
Mike | Nichols | |
| Acting, Directing |
The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny. |
Mike | Nichols | |
| Acting |
You can't be funny unless you're tragic, and you can't be tragic unless you're funny. |
Elaine | Stritch | |
| Acting |
You cannot tell an audience a lie. They know it before you do; before it's out of your mouth, they know it's a lie. |
Elaine | Stritch | |
| Acting |
Audiences are not strangers to me. They're the best friends I've got in my life. |
Elaine | Stritch | |
| Acting |
These performers that go on about their technique and craft - oh, puleeze! How boring! I don't know what 'technique' means. But I do know what experience is. |
Elaine | Stritch | |
| Volunteers |
Volunteers will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no volunteers. |
Ken | Wyman | |
| Fundraising |
Most giving is 80% emotion and 20 % rational. And the best way to get to someone's emotions is to tell a story. |
Unknown | ||
| Fundraising |
If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. |
Jeff | Brooks | |
| General |
The world is a complicated place, and there's a lot of division between people. The performing arts tend to unify people in a way nothing else does. |
David | Rubenstein | |
| 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 | |
| Diversity & Inclusion, Playwriting |
I write for myself, and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of Black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there. |
August | Wilson | |
| Playwriting |
Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting. |
August | Wilson | |
| Playwriting |
Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it. I would just actually fall asleep at the typewriter and would not be able to finish a scene written like that. What’s different now is that my work is much more emotional and connected to story. Because of that and the fact that the air around it is clean, it’s very strange. It reminds me a little bit of Edward Hopper’s paintings—where there’s something very real about the situation, it’s very mundane, but the air is always so clean you feel there’s something wrong. |
María Irene | Fornés |
