Theatre Quotes | Page 5 | AACT

Theatre Quotes

Words to the Wise
Quotations from a wide range of theatrical perspectives

For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.

Displaying 81 - 100 of 421. Show 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 | 60 results per page.
Category Quotesort ascending First Last Source
Directing

The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful.

Peter Brook
General

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

Stella Adler http://www.brainyquote.com
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, Directing

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.

Alfred Jarry http://izquotes.com/
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
Acting

The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting.

Sanford Meisner http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html
Directing

The truth is that there is no one accepted method for directing, any more than there is for any other art. How a director fares is greatly dependent on who that person is, his collaborators, and the project at hand. To complicate matters, the relationship between product and process isnt't always a direct and causal one. Some directors work themselves to the bone, while others do very little. Paradoxically, they achieve successes and failures in both categories. But it would be naive not to believe that most successful productions occur because of the intensive efforts of a skilled director.

Michael Bloom Thinking Like a Director: A Practical Handbook
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
Acting, General, Playwriting

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

Edward Albee wisdomquotes.com/
General

The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.

Roman Rolland http://www.wisdomportal.com/Quotes
General

The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.

Stella Adler http://www.brainyquote.com
General

The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda.

Noel Coward www.musicals101.com/noelquot.htm
General, Playwriting

The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.

David Hare
General

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action."

Thornton Wilder

http://www.quotecha.com/quotes/quotation_15961.html

General

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

Stella Adler http://www.brainyquote.com
General, Playwriting

The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.

Enid Bagnold
Acting

The theatre has built a whole art round the actor, based on the man and his double - the actor and his character.

Jean-Louis Barrault http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm
General

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Antonin Artaud
General

The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.

Federico Garcia Lorca
Acting, Costumes

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.

Edith Head

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