Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Management |
The core challenge for us as arts managers is to deal with change: changing external environmental conditions, evolving styles and approaches to the arts by our artists, advancements iin how we present and distribute our art to our ever-changing audiences, and the shifting competition for resources and attention. |
William J. | Byrnes | Management and the Arts (Fifth Edition) |
Acting |
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. [Hamlet] |
William | Shakespeare | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Fundraising |
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. |
William | James | http://www.museummarketingtips.com/quotes/giving.html |
General |
Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater. |
William | Inge | Saturday Review 22 Feb 64 |
General |
It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times. |
William | Prynne | http://izquotes.com/ |
Acting |
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. |
William | Hazlitt | |
Musical Theatre |
Wherever it came from, the musical came with its hair mussed and with an innocent, indolent, irreverent look on its bright, bland face. |
Walter | Kerr | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/walter_kerr.html |
Critics |
Reviewers must normally function as huff-and-puff artists blowing laggard theatergoers stageward. |
Walter | Kerr | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/walter_kerr.html |
Musical Theatre |
I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds. |
Wallace | Shawn | http://www.curtainup.com/timelyquotes.html |
Playwriting |
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 | |
Playwriting |
White male playwrights' works continue to dominate production slates. Sometimes it seems easier for them to have the texts of their driver's licenses produced than for the female or non-white playwright to have her best play produced. The reality is, they are more often given that all-important opportunity to fail than the women's play or ethnic play. |
Velina Hasu | Houston | http://www.pubinfo.vcu.edu/artweb/playwriting/quotes.html |
Playwriting |
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising. |
Vaclav | Havel | |
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 think, by and large, the level of acting is mediocre. When I go to the theatre, I get so angry. I don't go. |
Uta | Hagen | http://www.brainyquote.com |
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 | http://www.brainyquote.com |
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 | |
Acting |
I'm a bad liar; I don't know what to say backstage. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Directing, Shakespeare |
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 | |
Management |
In community theatres, "doers" seem to do the following: act, direct, choreograph, accompany, design, build, find, sew, sell, or usher. "Managers" plan, organize, staff, supervise and evaluate. Doers, like directors and crew chiefs, also "manage," and managers like stage managers also sometimes "do"--find props, paint sets, or hang lights. Leaders can also be managers and/or doers, but in their leadership capacity their activities include these: dreaming, pushing, causing to grow, problem-solving and inspiring. Their qualities of intelligence, imagination, commitment, perseverance, and passion are the very qualities that invite the rest of us to say "Yes!" |
Twink | Lynch | Boards In the Spotlight, p. 95 |
Backstage |
If we could read minds, we wouldn't need headsets. |
Tommy | Kendrick | http://www.denagy.com/techiejokes/tjokes.html |
Acting, Directing |
Audiences know what to expect. . . and that is all they are prepared to believe in. |
Tom | Stoppard | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html |
Playwriting |
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. [A take-off on Oscar Wilde's "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."] |
Tom | Stoppard | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Playwriting |
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 | |
General |
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action." |
Thornton | Wilder | |
General |
The world's a theater, the earth a stage, |
Thomas | Heywood | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Acting, Directing |
You know what's the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence. |
Thelonious | Monk | The Quotable Musician, from Bach to Tupac, by Sheila E. Anderson (Allworth Press) |
Playwriting |
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 | |
Playwriting |
A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute. |
Terence | Rattigan | |
Playwriting |
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself. |
Tennessee | Williams | http://www.notable-quotes.com/p/playwriting_quotes.html |
Playwriting |
Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people, really. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
Playwriting |
It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write. |
Tennessee | Williams | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Tallulah: My Autobiography |
Acting |
If you want to help the American theatre, don't be an actress, be an audience. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting. |
Steve | Buscemi | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
General |
A nonprofessional theatre is, simply, one comprised of people who do not derive their income from it and do not spend most of their time engaged in it. There are two distinct categories: (1) nonprofessional groups that present plays with some regularity; and (2) nonprofessional groups that are organized on a one-time basis to present a play or a show for some special purpose. The former represents what is known as community theatre, and the latter falls under the heading of amateur theatre (though both types are amateur, or nonprofessional). |
Stephen | Langley | Theatre Management & Production in America |
General |
You have two kinds of shows on Broadway -- revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is -- a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture. |
Stephen | Sondheim | NY Times 3/12/00 |
Acting |
It's not enough to have talent, you have to have a talent for your talent. |
Stella | Adler | |
Acting, Directing |
The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays. |
Stella | Adler | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
Don't use your conscious past, use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck with your own life. It's too little. |
Stella | Adler | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
General |
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
Acting |
Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture. |
Spencer | Tracy | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
General |
January, month of empty pockets! Let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead. |
Sidonie | Gabrielle | |
Acting |
Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is fifty percent of the performance. |
Shirley | Booth | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
We've put a man on the moon. If you miss a cue, no one will die. |
Shelli | Aderman | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html |
Acting |
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 | |
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 |
If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don't have it don't bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can't fake emotion. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
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 | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
You can't learn to act unless you're criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you'll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you're doing and trust it because it's out of you. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
The appearance and retirement of actors are the great events of the theatrical world; and their first performances fill the pit with conjecture and prognostication, as the first actions of a new monarch agitate nations with hope and fear. |
Samuel | Johnson | |
General |
The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. |
Samuel | Johnson | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |