Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote |
First |
Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Directing |
This ain't Chekhov, you know! [comment to cast during a rehearsal for "H.M.S. Pinafore"] |
Alan | Stambusky | |
| General |
Theater is life, film is art, television is furniture. |
Unknown | ||
| General |
All the world's a stage. Some of us just have better seats. |
Unknown | ||
| Lighting, Set Design |
When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you! |
Unknown | ||
| 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 | |
| Acting, Directing, General, Playwriting |
The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted. |
Voltaire | ||
| General |
It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack. |
Voltaire | ||
| 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 | ||
| 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 | |
| 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 |
