Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Acting |
Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant. |
Glenda | Jackson | |
Acting |
Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion. |
Kate | Reid | http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/acting |
Acting |
Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly. |
Rosalind | Russell | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis. |
Marlon | Brando | |
Acting |
Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four. |
Katherine | Hepburn | http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/acting |
Acting |
Acting is the most personal of our crafts. The make-up of a human being - his physical, mental and emotional habits - influence his acting to a much greater extent than commonly recognized. |
Lee | Strasberg | |
Acting |
Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an interpretive one. |
Paul | Newman | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
Acting |
Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results. |
Lee | Strasberg | |
Acting |
Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over. |
Alan | Rickman | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alanrickma251360.html |
Acting |
Acting's entertainment. It's not brain surgery. |
Anthony | Hopkins | Hello! Special Edition, 9.6.01. |
Acting |
Acting, in general, is something most people think they're incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I've ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don't, or trying to hide something. It's something everyone learns at an early age. |
Marlon | Brando | Newsweek, 13 March 1972 |
Acting |
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. |
William | Hazlitt | |
Acting |
Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness. |
Helen | Hayes | |
Acting |
Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too. |
Donald | Sinden | |
Acting |
Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is fifty percent of the performance. |
Shirley | Booth | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end. |
Helen | Hayes | |
Acting, Directing |
All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real. |
Constantin | Stanislavski | |
Acting |
All the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can't be taught. All the great actors can't talk about what they do, and they don't want to begin to talk about it. They just do it. |
Mike | Nichols | |
General |
All the world's a stage. Some of us just have better seats. |
Unknown | ||
General |
Although one may fail to find happiness in theatrical life, one never wishes to give it up after having once tasted its fruits. |
Anna | Pavlova | |
Acting, Directing, General |
Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine. |
Brooks | Atksinson | |
Directing |
An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation. |
Billy | Wilder | Friendly Advice (book) |
Acting |
An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow. |
Lawrence | Barrett | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
Acting |
An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents |
Alec | Guinness | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
Acting, Backstage, Directing |
An actor without techies is a naked person standing in the dark trying to emote. A techie without actors is a person with marketable skills. |
Mark | Leslie | http://www.denagy.com/techiejokes/tjokes.html |
Lighting |
An effective lighting design is like a beautiful painting. Your medium is bringing someone to an emotional state he or she would not achieve at that moment without your art. This does not and can not happen by accident. |
Glen | Cunningham | Stage Lighting Revealed |
Backstage |
An interesting difference between new and experienced stage managers is that the new stage manager thinks of running the show as the most difficult and most demanding part of the job, whereas the experienced stage manager thinks of it as the most relaxing part. Perhaps the reason is that experienced stage managers have built up work habits that make then so thoroughly prepared for the production phase that they [can] sit back during performances to watch that preparation pay off. |
Lawrence | Stern | Stage Management |
Fundraising |
Appreciation can make a day--even change a life, Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary. |
Margaret | Cousins | http://www.museummarketingtips.com/quotes/giving.html |
Playwriting |
As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays--to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash. |
Harold | Pinter | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
Acting |
As an actor, you can't play the tragedy. You can only play the choices, the intentions of your character. |
Christine | Andreas | Notes for CD "The Garland Variations" |
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 |