Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Acting |
It's not enough to have talent, you have to have a talent for your talent. |
Stella | Adler | |
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 | |
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 |
Acting is a matter of giving away secrets. |
Ellen | Barkin | |
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 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 |
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 |
The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting. |
Charles | Chaplin | |
General, Playwriting |
Drama - what literature does at night. |
George Jean | Nathan | |
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 | |
Playwriting |
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form. |
August | Strindberg | |
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 | |
Directing |
The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful. |
Peter | Brook | |
Directing, General |
The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are suddenly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life. The marvel of being one. |
Peter | Brook | |
Acting |
A cat actually thinks visibly. If you watch him jump on a shelf, the wish to jump and the action of jumping are one and the same thing... It's in exactly the same way that all Brook's exercises try to train the actor. The actor is trained to become so organically related within himself, he thinks completely with his body. He becomes one sensitive, responding whole... The whole of him is one. |
John | Heilpern | |
Acting |
Preparing a character is the opposite of building--it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore. |
Peter | Brook | |
General |
The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose -- and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization. |
John F | Kennedy | |
Backstage |
Perhaps, therefore, ideal stage managers not only need to be calm and meticulous professionals who know their craft, but masochists who feel pride in rising above impossible odds. |
Peter | Hall | |
Playwriting |
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. |
Alfred | Hitchcock | |
Acting, Directing |
The two happiest days in a theatre person's life: The day you start on a new show and the day the thing closes. |
Unknown | ||
General, Playwriting |
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect. |
David | Mamet | |
General |
The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there. |
Federico Garcia | Lorca | |
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 | ||
General |
The arts are at the very center of community development in this time of change...change for the better. The frontier and all that it once meant in economic development and in the sheer necessity of building a nation is being replaced by the frontier of the arts. In no other way can Americans so well express the core and blood of their democracy; for in the communities lies the final text of the acceptance of the arts as a necessity of everyday life. In terms of American democracy, the arts are for everyone. They are not reserved for the wealthy, or for the well-endowed museum, the gallery, or the ever-subsidized regional professional theater. As America emerges into a different understanding of her strength, it becomes clear that her strength is in the people and the places where the people live. The people, if shown the way, can create art in and of themselves. |
Robert | Gard | |
General |
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 | |
Backstage, Management |
Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll understand. |
Chinese Proverb | ||
Management, Volunteers |
I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. |
Charles | Schwab | |
Backstage |
Definition of Stage Manager: The person who rarely gets credit when everything goes right. |
Anonymous | ||
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 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 |
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 |
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 |
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 work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end. |
Helen | Hayes | |
Acting |
The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life. |
Helen | Hayes | |
Acting |
I'm a bad liar; I don't know what to say backstage. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most. |
Uta | Hagen | |
General |
Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own. |
Moss | Hart | |
Acting |
I don't make mistakes, I have unintentional improvisations. |
Anonymous |