Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Acting, Directing, General |
I think that first nights should come near the end of a play's run--as indeed, they often do. |
Peter | Ustinov | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
I learned acting by doing it. And although I had never taken an acting class, it didn't take long to learn how to be on the stage. All you have to do is to be humiliated in front of an audience a few times. If you don't like being humiliated publicly, you learn how to act. |
Ron | Vawter | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Playwriting |
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships. |
Gore | Vidal | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Playwriting |
Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process. |
Paula | Vogel | 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 |
Talk low, talk slow, and don't say too much. |
John | Wayne | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
General, Management |
The artistic director gratifies his special need to relate to people in a highly accentuated paternalistic and maternalistic fashion. |
Philip | Weissman | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting, Directing |
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act. |
Orson | Welles | |
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 | |
Acting, Directing, General |
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. |
Oscar | Wilde | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
General |
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life. |
Oscar | Wilde | http://www.worldofquotes.com |
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 | |
Acting |
I love acting. It is so much more real than life. |
Oscar | Wilde | http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/acting |
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 | |
Directing |
An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation. |
Billy | Wilder | Friendly Advice (book) |
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 | |
Lighting |
Lighting design is ultimately not about numbers and calculations. It is about feelings and spontaneous reactions. Although the designer can calculate how 'big and bright' a fixture will be at any distance, from the manufacturer's data sheet, eventually he must just instinctively 'know', how a specific fixture will perform at any distance. This comes from both practice and experience. |
Bill | Williams | Lighting Mechanics, by Bill Williams |
Lighting |
The first rule of stage lighting is...there aren't any. |
Bill | Williams | Lighting Mechanics, by Bill Williams |
Lighting |
Ultimately, the lighting designer must be an artist! He must understand style, composition, balance, esthetics and human emotions. He must also understand the science of light, optics, vision, the psychology of perception and lighting technology. Using these tools the lighting designer must learn to think, feel and create with his heart. |
Bill | Williams | Lighting Mechanics, by Bill Williams |