Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category |
Quote |
First | Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | ||
| Critics |
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs. |
John | Osborne | Time, 31 October 1977 |
| Acting |
Audiences are not strangers to me. They're the best friends I've got in my life. |
Elaine | Stritch | |
| Acting, Directing |
Audiences know what to expect. . . and that is all they are prepared to believe in. |
Tom | Stoppard | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html |
| Acting |
Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model. |
George | Lewes | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Costumes, Set Design |
Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. Routines have their purposes, but the merely routine is the hidden enemy of high art. [Advice to theatrical designers,] |
Cecil | Beaton | The Secret of How to Startle Theatre Arts May 57 |
| Fundraising |
Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough. |
Oprah | Winfrey | http://www.museummarketingtips.com/quotes/giving.html |
| Backstage |
Beat to fit, paint to match. |
Kate | Bolgrien | http://www.denagy.com/techiejokes/tjokes.html |
| Costumes |
Before a character even speaks, we 'read' their appearance through their costume. |
Peter Ruthven | Hall | http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/events.htm |
| Playwriting |
Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul. |
Henrik | Ibsen | http://www.notable-quotes.com/p/playwriting_quotes.html |
