Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Fundraising |
Most giving is 80% emotion and 20 % rational. And the best way to get to someone's emotions is to tell a story. |
Unknown | ||
Acting |
A fool cannot be an actor, though an actor may act a fool's part. |
Sophocles | http://www.giga-usa.com/quotes/topics/acting_t003.htm | |
General |
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. |
Aristotle | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips | |
General |
THEATRE LOGIC A drop shouldn't and a Tripping is O.K. A Strike is work |
Unknown | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html | |
Directing, Diversity & Inclusion, Management, Playwriting |
What is Diversity in simple words? What is Equity in simple words? Diversity vs Inclusion |
"What is DEI & EDI? – The Complete Guide" on Diversity for Social Impact website | ||
Acting, Directing, Diversity & Inclusion, Playwriting |
5 Tips to Increase Diversity in Theatre: 1. Be proactive and participate in outreach to groups that represent actors of color, like Asian-American Performers Action Coalition or the African-American Artists Alliance, to bring them into the casting process. 2. If you’re a playwright, lyricist, book writer, or a creator, ask yourself if the race of your characters is relevant to the story, and if not, specify that. 3. Do your research on racism and internal bias before beginning the creative process. Understanding the history of these issues within the business will help create an inclusive and positive environment. 4. As an actor, be conscious of the roles you accept and be self-reflective about whether your racial or ethnic background or physical abilities would be appropriate for the part you’re playing. 5. Be careful of engaging in tokenism or promoting harmful or damaging caricatures. Truly color-conscious casting gives members of marginalized groups opportunities to play real, developed characters, not one-dimensional stereotypes. |
Playbill |
Playbill, June 23, 2017 [ https://www.playbill.com/article/5-steps-toward-making-theatre-more-diverse ] |
|
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 | ||
Lighting, Set Design |
When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you! |
Unknown | ||
Acting, Directing, General, Playwriting |
The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted. |
Voltaire | ||
Directing, Diversity & Inclusion, Management |
A diversity of voices is inherently innovative—the form of theatre changes depending on who is telling the story. By investing in diversifying the voices that are amplified through live theatre, we are contributing to the growth of the art form. |
Round House Theatre |
Round House Theatre statement on Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility [ https://www.roundhousetheatre.org/About/Equity,-Diversity,-and-Inclusion ] |
|
Acting |
Every performer has moments of self doubt. The great ones, however,overcome every obstacle to reach their full artistic potential. It takes talent, to be sure, but it also takes a personality that simply will not settle for second best. That's what makes us respect the effort and admire the results. |
Unknown | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html | |
Backstage, Management |
Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll understand. |
Chinese Proverb | ||
Management |
What constitutes a good manager in this field? He must be knowledgeable in the art with which he is concerned, an impresario, labor negotiator, diplomat, educator, publicity and public relations expert, politician, skilled businessman, a social sophisticate, a servant of the community, a tireless leader -- becomingly humble before authority -- a teacher, a tyrant, and a continuing student of the arts. |
Rockefeller Panel Report | Rockefeller Panel Report: The Performing Arts | |
General |
It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack. |
Voltaire | ||
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 | ||
Fundraising |
You cannot expect people to give to you on an annual basis if they have never heard of your organization or are unaware of what you do in the community and why it is so important. As part of this annual giving plan, your board of directors (with staff help) needs to have a time of brainstorming so you can identify all your “target markets” i.e. those people with whom you need to establish a relationship. |
NonprofitExpert.com | http://www.nonprofitexpert.com/annualgiving.htm | |
Acting |
I don't make mistakes, I have unintentional improvisations. |
Anonymous | ||
Backstage |
Definition of Stage Manager: The person who rarely gets credit when everything goes right. |
Anonymous | ||
General |
All the world's a stage. Some of us just have better seats. |
Unknown | ||
General |
Theater is life, film is art, television is furniture. |
Unknown | ||
Directing |
This ain't Chekhov, you know! [comment to cast during a rehearsal for "H.M.S. Pinafore"] |
Alan | Stambusky | |
Acting |
Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent. |
Alan | Rickman | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alanrickma251358.html |
Acting |
Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over. |
Alan | Rickman | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alanrickma251360.html |
Directing |
Directing takes such a big lump out of your life. |
Alan | Rickman | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alanrickma251372.html |
Critics, General |
Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism. |
Alan Jay | Lerner | http://www.worldofquotes.com |
Acting |
To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life. |
Albert | Finney | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting, Shakespeare |
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 | My Name Escapes Me, 1996 |
Acting |
An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents |
Alec | Guinness | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
Acting |
Act well your part; there all the honor lies. |
Alexander | Pope | Essay on Man, Epistle iv, line 193 |
Playwriting |
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. |
Alfred | Hitchcock | |
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, Management |
Someone once said that being an artistic director is the intelligent exercise of one's own taste. And that is what I believe with all my heart and soul. If you start second-guessing yourself in advance, I think you're done for. |
Andre | Bishop | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Directing |
One of the issues peculiar to community theater is dealing with inexperienced or outright bad actors who are so unimaginative, so lacking in energy, that no matter what devices you use, you just don't seem to be helping them that much. They will improve. It is your rseponsibility that the actor should ever feel that he or she has failed. |
Ann | Jellicoe | Stage Directions Guide to Directing |
General |
Although one may fail to find happiness in theatrical life, one never wishes to give it up after having once tasted its fruits. |
Anna | Pavlova | |
Lighting |
Lighting paperwork is a living thing, continually evolving throughout the production process until opening night. |
Anne E. | McMills | The Assistant Light Designer's Toolkit |
Acting |
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 | Sunday Express, 1960 |
Acting |
Acting's entertainment. It's not brain surgery. |
Anthony | Hopkins | Hello! Special Edition, 9.6.01. |
Playwriting |
I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage. |
Anton | Chekhov | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Playwriting |
The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard. |
Anton | Chekhov | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
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 |
General |
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 | |
Acting |
I don't possess a lot of self-confidence. I'm an actor so I simply act confident every time I hit the stage. I am consumed with the fear of failing. Reaching deep down and finding confidence has made all my dreams come true. |
Arsenio | Hall | |
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 |
Playwriting |
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. |
Arthur | Miller | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
Playwriting |
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 | |
Playwriting |
If the nature of human experience changes with the color of a man's skin, then the racists have been right all along. |
Athol | Fugard | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Diversity & Inclusion, Playwriting |
I write for myself, and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of Black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there. |
August | Wilson | |
Playwriting |
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form. |
August | Strindberg | |
Playwriting |
When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking. |
August | Wilson | http://www.notable-quotes.com/p/playwriting_quotes.html |
General, Playwriting | All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics. | August | Wilson | The Paris Review (The Art of Theater No. 14) |
Playwriting |
Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting. |
August | Wilson | |
Playwriting |
I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre. |
Barrie | Keefe | http://izquotes.com/ |
Acting |
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 | It Happened On Broadway |
Acting |
You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you. |
Ben | Kingsley | |
Acting, Shakespeare |
You have to think about the big speeches in Shakespeare as the most important things the character has ever said; they need to be spoken with your chest cut open, your heart bare, and with tremendous passion. You need to tear the words from the sky. If you don't feel like you've run a marathon when you're done, you're not doing it right. It takes courage to open yourself up to an audience like that, letting them see your insides without desperately trying to show them--it takes practice. |
Ben | Crystal | author of Shakespeare on Toast |
General |
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself. |
Bertolt | Brecht | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html |
Playwriting |
But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. If I write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don't have to be very smart. |
Beth | Henley | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/beth_henley.html |
Acting |
Pray to God and say the lines. |
Bette | Davis | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business. |
Bette | Davis | http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/acting |
Lighting |
Stage lighting is no longer a matter of simple illumination as it was less than 100 years ago. Today, the lighting designer is expected to be a master of art, science, history, psychology, communications, politics, and sometimes even mind reading. |
Bill | Williams | http://www.mts.net/%7Ewilliam5/sld/sld-100.htm |