Theatre Quotes | Page 5 | AACT

Theatre Quotes

Words to the Wise
Quotations from a wide range of theatrical perspectives

For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.

Displaying 161 - 200 of 421. Show 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 | 60 results per page.
Category Quotesort ascending First Last Source
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

Preparing a character is the opposite of building--it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.

Peter Brook
Acting

Pray to God and say the lines.

Bette Davis Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur
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
Playwriting

Playwrights must be allowed to be at less than their best sometimes, without meeting an all-out critical assault.

Peter Hall http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html
Acting, Shakespeare

Playing Shakespeare requires technique. You don't play a Bach toccata by getting in the mood.

Kevin Kline The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Acting, Shakespeare

Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down, unless you're a king.

Josephine Hull The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Acting

Play well, or play badly, but play truly.

Konstantin Stanislavsky Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur
Backstage

Perhaps, therefore, ideal stage managers not only need to be calm and meticulous professionals who know their craft, but masochists who feel pride in rising above impossible odds.

Peter Hall
Playwriting

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'

Edward Albee http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html
Critics

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.

George Bernard Shaw http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html
Acting, Directing, General

Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.

George Jean Nathan The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Acting

Onstage, you just have to tell the absolute truth about the character you are playing. You hope you communicate it, and you hope it comes back like a tennis ball. If you're listening to the sound of your own voice, nobody else is. The audience knows, and they freeze on you.

Carol Channing It Happened On Broadway
Acting

Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it.

Elaine Stritch It Happened On Broadway
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
Directing

One of the issues peculiar to community theater is dealing with inexperienced or outright bad actors who are so unimaginative, so lacking in energy, that no matter what devices you use, you just don't seem to be helping them that much. They will improve. It is your rseponsibility that the actor should ever feel that he or she has failed.

Ann Jellicoe Stage Directions Guide to Directing
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
Playwriting

One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty quick.

Moss Hart The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
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

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
Playwriting

Once after Barefoot In the Park had been playing for about a week I went back to see it, watching the audience, which was just falling over laughing except for one guy sitting the aisle. I was transfixed. I said to myself, there seems to be no way to get to him. No one else would I watch except this one man. My wife joined me about 20 minutes later and asked me how it was going, and I said, terrible. I really meant it. There was no way to get to this man. It destroyed me.

Neil Simon Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater
Acting

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;/ 'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.

Oliver Goldsmith http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre
Lighting

Oftentimes the quality of the light tells the story: the time of day, the weather, whether sun is streaming through the window. It can also help you appreciate what the actor is feeling, what the playwright wants you to feel. Any engineer can put a spot on someone.

Jules Fisher It Happened On Broadway
Acting

Of course, the age-old tradition that a star must appear even if he or she is practically dying is an excellent one, but it can be carried too far. I one played a performance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle with a temperature of 103 and gave sixteen members of the company mumps, thereby closing the play and throwing everybody out of work. There may be a moral lurking somewhere in this, but I cannot for the life of me discover what it is.

Noel Coward www.musicals101.com/noelquot.htm
Acting

Nobody "becomes" a character. You can't act unless you are who you are.

Marlon Brando Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur
General

No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

Kenneth Tynan http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/k/kenneth_tynan.html
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
Costumes

Next to a tenor, a wardrobe woman is the touchiest thing in show business. [Birdie, in All About Eve]

Joseph Mankiewicz The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Acting

Never not dare to hang yourself. That's the only way you grow in your profession. You must continually attempt things that you think are beyond you, or you get into a complete rut.

Charles Laughton Wikipedia (under Bette Davis)
Acting

Never get caught acting.

Lillian Gish Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur
Acting

My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive.

Gwyneth Paltrow http://www.worldofquotes.com
Acting, Shakespeare

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' ---the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity.

Alec Guinness My Name Escapes Me, 1996
Playwriting

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.

Meredith Willson
Fundraising

Most giving is 80% emotion and 20 % rational. And the best way to get to someone's emotions is to tell a story.

Unknown
Directing

Most directors work from inside out and from the outside in. They concentrate not only on the life of the characters but also on the play's structrual or external elements, including its central conflict, function, event, architecture, and suspense.

Michael Bloom Thinking Like a Director: A Practical Handbook
Acting

Many years ago I remember a famous actress explaining to me with perfect seriousness that before making an entrance she always stood aside to allow God to go on first. I can also remember that on that particular occasion He gave a singularly uninspired performance.

Noel Coward www.musicals101.com/noelquot.htm
Musical Theatre

Look, I'm over 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater - you do the math!

Nathan Lane http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/musical_theater
Critics, Playwriting

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

Jean Cocteau

http://www.quotegarden.com/critics.html

Acting

Like the Bible, Stanislavsky's basic texts on acting can be quoted to any purpose.

Lee Strasberg The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Lighting

Lights are to drama what music is to the lyrics of a song. The greatest part of my success in the theatre I attribute to my feeling for colors, translated into effects of light.

David Belasco The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips

Pages

  • Facebook
  • AACT on Instagram
  • AACT on LinkedIn
Authorize.Net Merchant - Click to Verify Credit Card Merchant Services