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Theatre Quotes

Theatre Quotes

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Displaying 301 - 320 of 441
  • " When you go into the professional world, at a stock theater somewhere, backstage you will meet an older actor--someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes about life in the theater. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man."

    - Sanford Meisner

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Don't think you're funny. It'll never work if you think you're funny."

    - George Abbott

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " 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

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


  • " The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout."

    - Robert Holman

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


  • " 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

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


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

    - Enid Bagnold


  • " The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent."

    - Robert Brustein


  • " 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


  • " Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising."

    - Vaclav Havel


  • " A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten."

    - David Mamet


  • " A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great."

    - Arthur Miller


  • " Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute."

    - John Mortimer


  • " Good drama must be drastic."

    - Friedrich Schlegel


  • " I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act."

    - Orson Welles


  • " A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it."

    - Thornton Wilder


  • " Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live."

    - Shelley Winters


  • " Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake."

    - W.H. Auden


  • " 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


  • " No one makes you write plays; the world could sort of get along without me turning out a play every year, so I do this because I enjoy it enormously. It gives me great pleasure, and working in the theatre is, I think its own reward."

    - Terrence McNally


  • " I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre."

    - Barrie Keefe

    Source: http://izquotes.com/