Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Playwriting |
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form. |
August | Strindberg | |
| Acting |
Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it. |
Elaine | Stritch | It Happened On Broadway |
| 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 | |
| Playwriting |
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple. |
J.M. | Synge | http://www.brainyquote.com/ |
| Acting |
Act in your pauses. |
Ellen | Terry | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
| Acting |
Imagination! Imagination! I put it first years ago, when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success upon the stage. And I am still of the same opinion. Imagination, industry [hard work], and intelligence--the three I's--are all indispensable to the actor, but of these three the greatest is, without any doubt, imagination. |
Ellen | Terry | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Playwriting, Shakespeare |
Shakespeare's plays are bad enough, but yours are even worse. [Tolstoy to Chekov] |
Leo | Tolstoy | Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives, by Joseph Epstein |
| Acting |
Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture. |
Spencer | Tracy | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
| Playwriting |
Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist. |
Kenneth | Tynan | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Critics |
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car. |
Kenneth | Tynan | New York Times Magazine, Jan 9. 1966 |
| General |
No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world. |
Kenneth | Tynan | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/k/kenneth_tynan.html |
| Critics, Playwriting |
The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic. |
Kenneth | Tynan | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/k/kenneth_tynan.html |
| General |
Theater is life, film is art, television is furniture. |
Unknown | ||
| General |
All the world's a stage. Some of us just have better seats. |
Unknown | ||
| Lighting, Set Design |
When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you! |
Unknown | ||
| Acting, Directing |
The two happiest days in a theatre person's life: The day you start on a new show and the day the thing closes. |
Unknown | ||
| Management |
As nearly everyone knows, a manager has practically nothing to do except to decide what is to be done; to tell somebody to do it; to listen to reasons why it should not be done, why it should be done by someone else, or why it should be done in a different way; to follow up to see if the thing has been done; to discover that it has not; to inquire why; to listen to excuses from the person who should have done it; to follow up again to see if the thing has been done, only to discover that it has been done incorrectly; to point out how it should have been done; to conclude that as long as it has been done, it may as well be left where it is; to wonder if it is not time to get rid of a person who cannot do a thing right; to reflect that he or she probably has a family, and that certainly any successor would be just as bad, and maybe worse; to consider how much simpler and better the thing would have been done if one had done it oneself in the first place; to reflect sadly that one could have done it right in 20 minutes, and, as things turned out, one had to spend two days to find out why it has taken three weeks for somebody else to do it wrong. |
Unknown |
