Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote | First | Last |
Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Playwriting |
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form. |
August | Strindberg | |
| 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 | |
| General, Playwriting |
Drama - what literature does at night. |
George Jean | Nathan | |
| Lighting, Set Design |
When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you! |
Unknown | ||
| Acting |
The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting. |
Charles | Chaplin | |
| 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 | |
| Backstage |
Definition of Stage Manager: The person who rarely gets credit when everything goes right. |
Anonymous | ||
| General |
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 | |
| Acting, Directing, General |
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 |
Acting expresses a part of the self otherwise hidden to the conscious mind. |
Lisa M. | O'Neill | |
| Playwriting |
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 | |
| Acting |
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. |
William | Hazlitt | |
| Acting, Directing, General, Playwriting |
The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted. |
Voltaire | ||
| 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 | |
| Acting |
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 | |
| Acting |
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 | |
| Acting |
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 | |
| General |
It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack. |
Voltaire | ||
| Acting, Directing, General |
It is not theatre that is indispensable, but something quite different. To cross the frontiers between you and me. |
Jerzy | Grotowski | |
| 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 |
