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Theatre Quotes

Theatre Quotes

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Displaying 381 - 400 of 441
  • " Drama - what literature does at night."

    - George Jean Nathan


  • " 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


  • " I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form."

    - August Strindberg


  • " 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


  • " The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful."

    - Peter Brook


  • " The Civic Theater idea, as a distinctive issue, implies the conscious awakening of a people to self-government in the activities of its leisure. To this end, organization of the arts of the theater, participation by the people in these arts not mere spectatorship, a new resulting technique, leadership by means of a permanent staff of artists (not of merchants in art), elimination of private profit by endowment and public support, dedication in the service to the whole community: these are chief among its essentials, and these imply a new and nobler scope for the art of the theater itself. [1912]"

    - Percy McKaye


  • " On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;/ 'Twas only that when he was off he was acting."

    - Oliver Goldsmith

    Source: http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre


  • " 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


  • " Acting expresses a part of the self otherwise hidden to the conscious mind."

    - Lisa M. O'Neill


  • " 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


  • " Actors are the only honest hypocrites."

    - William Hazlitt


  • " The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted."

    - Voltaire


  • " 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


  • " Act well your part; there all the honor lies."

    - Alexander Pope

    Source: Essay on Man, Epistle iv, line 193


  • " 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


  • " 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


  • " 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


  • " 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

    Source: Stage Lighting Revealed


  • " 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


  • " The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life."

    - Oscar Wilde

    Source: http://www.worldofquotes.com