Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Acting |
The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life. |
Helen | Hayes | |
Acting |
Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end. |
Helen | Hayes | |
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 |
The actor creates with his own flesh and blood all those things which all the arts try in some way to describe. |
Lee | Strasberg | |
Acting |
A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered. |
Lee | Strasberg | |
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 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 | |
Playwriting |
Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong. |
Meredith | Willson | |
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 | |
Playwriting |
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form. |
August | Strindberg | |
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 | |
General, Playwriting |
Drama - what literature does at night. |
George Jean | Nathan | |
Lighting, Set Design |
When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you! |
Unknown | ||
Acting |
The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting. |
Charles | Chaplin | |
Acting |
First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent. |
Michael | Caine | |
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 | |
Playwriting |
I haven't really written my plays and books -- I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood. |
Sebastian | Barry | |
Acting |
Acting is a matter of giving away secrets. |
Ellen | Barkin | |
General, Playwriting |
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. |
Oscar | Wilde | |
Acting |
Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
It's not enough to have talent, you have to have a talent for your talent. |
Stella | Adler | |
Acting |
One mustn't allow acting to be like stockbroker -- you must not take it just as a means of earning a living, to go down every day to do a job of work. The big thing is to combine punctuality, efficiency, good nature, obedience, intelligence, and concentration with an unawareness of what is going to happen next, thus keeping yourself available for excitement. |
John | Gielgud | |
Acting, Directing |
All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real. |
Constantin | Stanislavski | |
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 |
A lot of what acting is paying attention. |
Robert | Redford | |
Acting |
One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price. I've never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality. |
Robert | De Niro | |
Acting |
Acting is experience with something sweet behind it. |
Humphrey | Bogart | |
Backstage |
Definition of Stage Manager: The person who rarely gets credit when everything goes right. |
Anonymous | ||
Acting, Directing, General |
It is not theatre that is indispensable, but something quite different. To cross the frontiers between you and me. |
Jerzy | Grotowski | |
General |
It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack. |
Voltaire | ||
Acting |
It isn't what I do, but how I do it. It isn't what I say but how I say it - and how I look when I do and say it. |
Mae | West | |
Acting |
What is the main problem of the actor? It is to keep the audience awake, and not let them go to sleep, then wake up and go home feeling they've wasted their money. |
Laurence | Olivier | |
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 | |
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, Directing, General, Playwriting |
The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted. |
Voltaire | ||
Acting |
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. |
William | Hazlitt | |
Playwriting |
Remember! the word is playwright --W-R-I-G-H-T -- like wheelwright. A play is not so much written as wrought. it's designed and built and shaped; it's carved out. |
Garson | Kanin | |
Acting |
Acting expresses a part of the self otherwise hidden to the conscious mind. |
Lisa M. | O'Neill | |
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 | |
General |
I don't see why people want new plays all the time. What would happen to concerts if people wanted new music all the time? |
Clive | Barnes | |
Directing, Diversity & Inclusion, General, Management |
Ultimately, in order to have theatre reflect the world as it is, the industry must value the artists that it has historically marginalized, and start by redirecting resources to support these artists’ work and lives—a move that could both make theatre a more inclusive space for both artists and audiences. |
Emilyn | Kowaleski |
"Reimagining A Diverse and Inclusive Theatrical Space," Media Diversity Institute [ https://www.media-diversity.org/reimagining-a-diverse-and-inclusive-thea... ] |
Playwriting |
By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings. |
Arthur | Miller | http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Miller |
General |
It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times. |
William | Prynne | http://izquotes.com/ |
Playwriting |
I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre. |
Barrie | Keefe | http://izquotes.com/ |
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/ |
General |
The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout. |
Robert | Holman | http://izquotes.com/ |
General |
To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner. |
Eleanora | Duse | http://izquotes.com/ |
General |
Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one. |
Robert | Brustein | http://izquotes.com/ |
General, Musical Theatre, Playwriting |
If Hitler's still alive, I hope he's out of town with a musical. [variously attributed] |
Larry | Gelbart | http://povonline.com/Hitler%20Line.htm |
Acting |
I have to act to live. |
Laurence | Olivier | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Acting |
When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting. |
Steve | Buscemi | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Playwriting |
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. [A take-off on Oscar Wilde's "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."] |
Tom | Stoppard | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Playwriting |
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships. |
Gore | Vidal | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Playwriting |
A good play is a play which when acted upon the boards make an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play. |
Maurice | Baring | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
General |
The world's a theater, the earth a stage, |
Thomas | Heywood | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Acting, Directing, General |
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. |
Oscar | Wilde | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
General |
I will accept anything in the theatre . . . provided it amuses or moves me. But if it does neither, I want to go home. |
Noel | Coward | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Acting |
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;/ 'Twas only that when he was off he was acting. |
Oliver | Goldsmith | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Musical Theatre |
Look, I'm over 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater - you do the math! |
Nathan | Lane | http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/musical_theater |
Playwriting |
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last. |
Anton | Chekhov | http://www.ag.wastholm.net/category/art |