Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote | First | Last |
Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acting, Costumes |
The subjective actress thinks of clothes only as they apply to her; the objective actress thinks of them only as they affect others, as a tool for the job. |
Edith | Head | |
| Lighting, Set Design |
When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you! |
Unknown | ||
| 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 | |
| Acting |
Acting is experience with something sweet behind it. |
Humphrey | Bogart | |
| Acting |
One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price. I've never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality. |
Robert | De Niro | |
| Acting |
A lot of what acting is paying attention. |
Robert | Redford | |
| Acting |
Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant. |
Glenda | Jackson | |
| Acting, Directing |
All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real. |
Constantin | Stanislavski | |
| Acting |
One mustn't allow acting to be like stockbroker -- you must not take it just as a means of earning a living, to go down every day to do a job of work. The big thing is to combine punctuality, efficiency, good nature, obedience, intelligence, and concentration with an unawareness of what is going to happen next, thus keeping yourself available for excitement. |
John | Gielgud |
