Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote | First | Last |
Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General |
The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. |
Samuel | Johnson | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| General |
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. |
Aristotle | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips | |
| Set Design |
A stage set should not make a pretty picture of its own. The empty stage should look formal and pleasing, but should seem to be waiting for the action to complete it; it should not hold definite significance in itself. |
G. Wilson | Knight | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Set Design |
There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead. |
Robert | Edmond Jones | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Costumes, Lighting, Set Design |
A play is a painting that moves. Instead of it holding still, and you are looking at it, you hold still and it scrolls by. |
Patricia | Zipprodt | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Costumes |
Why don't I just give you some money, then you can buy whatever you want to wear on stage. You obviously want a shopper, and I am merely a designer. [said to an uncooperative actress during a costume fitting] |
Nan | Cibula-Jenkins | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Costumes |
Next to a tenor, a wardrobe woman is the touchiest thing in show business. [Birdie, in All About Eve] |
Joseph | Mankiewicz | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Lighting |
In a circle of light on the stage in the midst of darkness, you have the sensation of being entirely alone. . . . This is called solitude in public. . . . You can always enclose yourself in this circle, like a snail in its shell. |
Konstantin | Stanislavsky | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
