Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category |
Quote |
First | Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acting |
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. [Hamlet] |
William | Shakespeare | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| 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 | |
| Acting, Directing, General |
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. |
Oscar | Wilde | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
| 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 performance is not an illusionist copy of reality, its imitation; nor is it a set of conventions, accepted as a kind of deliberate game, playing at a seperate theatrical reality... The actor does not play, does not imitate, or pretend. He is himself. |
Ludwik Flaszen | Flaszen | Grotowski's Laboratory |
| Acting, Directing, General, Playwriting |
The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted. |
Voltaire | ||
| 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 |
| General |
The number of people who will not go to a show they do not want to see is unlimited. |
Oscar | Hammerstein | |
| General |
The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout. |
Robert | Holman | http://izquotes.com/ |
| Acting |
The most precious things in speech are pauses. |
Ralph | Richardson | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
