Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category |
Quote |
First | Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Playwriting |
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. |
Arthur | Miller | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
| Directing, General, Playwriting |
The stage play is a trial, not a deed of violence. The soul is opened, like the combination of a safe, by means of a word. You don't require an acetylene torch. |
Jean | Giradoux | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
| General |
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life. |
Oscar | Wilde | http://www.worldofquotes.com |
| Lighting |
The stage designer quickly learns that things are not always what they appear to be. A director who asks for 'more light' on an actor, probably doesn't mean that at all. Instead he really just wants 'to see the actor better'. The designer might chose to reduce the lighting contrast around the actor, or simply ask the actor to tip his head up a bit. Both solutions solve the problem without 'adding more light'. So the lighting designer also has to be a good listener, a careful interpreter and a skilled crafts person. |
Bill | Williams | http://www.mts.net/%7Ewilliam5/sld/sld-100.htm |
| Costumes, Lighting, Set Design |
The sole aim of the arts of scene-designing, costuming, lighting, is to enhance the natural powers of the actor. |
Robert | Edmond Jones | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| 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 |
| Acting |
The secret of staying fresh in a show is to remember that the audience you're playing for that night has never seen it before. |
Danny | Kaye | |
| Playwriting |
The Russian dramatist is one who, walking through a cemetery, does not see the flowers on the graves. The American dramatist . . . Does not see the graves under the flowers. |
George Jean | Nathan | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Shakespeare |
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good. |
Robert | Graves | Robert Graves (1895 - 1985) |
| Directing, General |
The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are suddenly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life. The marvel of being one. |
Peter | Brook | |
| 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 |
