lm advertising
test this space
Theatre Quotes
Theatre Quotes
How to Search
- To browse quotes by category, leave the Search box empty and choose a category, then click the "Search" button.
- To find a quote with a specific word, enter a single word in the Search box, then click the "Search" button.
- To find a quote by a specific person, enter their name in the Search box, then click the "Search" button. Tip: Searching by using only the person's last name usually works best.
- " 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
- " Having talent is like having blue eyes. You don't admire a man for the colour of his eyes. I admire a man for what he does with his talent."
- Anthony Quinn
Source: Sunday Express, 1960
- " I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point."
- Michael Caine
Source: Film Yearbook, 1985
- " It is not theatre that is indispensable, but something quite different. To cross the frontiers between you and me."
- Jerzy Grotowski
- " 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
Source: Grotowski's Laboratory
- " Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' ---the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity."
- Alec Guinness
Source: My Name Escapes Me, 1996
- " Oftentimes the quality of the light tells the story: the time of day, the weather, whether sun is streaming through the window. It can also help you appreciate what the actor is feeling, what the playwright wants you to feel. Any engineer can put a spot on someone."
- Jules Fisher
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction."
- Jules Fisher
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " I want to make the audience laugh and cry within ten seconds, to show just how close those emotions are."
- Neil Simon
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " Casting is instrumental in helping you understand the play. If you cast it right, as soon as the actor steps on the stage, you get certain impressions that help you understand what the play is about."
- Howard Kissel
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " Onstage, you just have to tell the absolute truth about the character you are playing. You hope you communicate it, and you hope it comes back like a tennis ball. If you're listening to the sound of your own voice, nobody else is. The audience knows, and they freeze on you."
- Carol Channing
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it."
- Elaine Stritch
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " The fun for me is knowing what the other person is saying and what my character would be thinking at that time. On the stage you get the chance to do all that, to analyze and build a part, to react, to contribute something no one else can--not the author, not even the director."
- Barry Nelson
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " Once after Barefoot In the Park had been playing for about a week I went back to see it, watching the audience, which was just falling over laughing except for one guy sitting the aisle. I was transfixed. I said to myself, there seems to be no way to get to him. No one else would I watch except this one man. My wife joined me about 20 minutes later and asked me how it was going, and I said, terrible. I really meant it. There was no way to get to this man. It destroyed me."
- Neil Simon
Source: Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater
- " Seen from the point of view of the composer, the most nonsensical practice is that of casting people in musicals who are unable to sing. No one would cast a dancing part with someone who cannot dance sufficiently to come up to professional standards. The same is true of acting. But when it comes to singing, more often than not it is amateur night. . . . Either musicals should be written for specified performers in the first place, or they should be cast with people who are adequate to its dancing, acting and singing demands."
- Ernest Gold
Source: Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater
- " I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced--although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world--what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done."
- Lillian Hellman
Source: Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater
- " There is no greater gift that a person can be given than to be put in touch with his creativity. [Theatre] transformed my life. [Director Declan Donnellan on discovering theatre as a lonely 16 year old.]"
- Declan Donnellan
Source: The Guardian
- " It's not enough to have talent, you have to have a talent for your talent."
- Stella Adler
- " 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
- " 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