Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Directing, Diversity & Inclusion, Management, Playwriting |
What is Diversity in simple words? What is Equity in simple words? Diversity vs Inclusion |
"What is DEI & EDI? – The Complete Guide" on Diversity for Social Impact website | ||
Acting |
Don't think you're funny. It'll never work if you think you're funny. |
George | Abbott | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Playwriting |
The dramatist's function is (1) to earn a living for his family and himself and (2) to try to entertain people for a few hours. |
Lee | Adams | Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists on Theater |
Acting |
We've put a man on the moon. If you miss a cue, no one will die. |
Shelli | Aderman | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html |
Acting, Directing |
The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays. |
Stella | Adler | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
General |
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
Acting |
It's not enough to have talent, you have to have a talent for your talent. |
Stella | Adler | |
Acting |
Don't use your conscious past, use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck with your own life. It's too little. |
Stella | Adler | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting, General, Playwriting |
The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it. |
Edward | Albee | wisdomquotes.com/ |
Playwriting |
A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage. |
Edward | Albee | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
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 |
Playwriting |
The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play. |
Robert | Anderson | Theatre Arts Mar 58 |
Acting |
As an actor, you can't play the tragedy. You can only play the choices, the intentions of your character. |
Christine | Andreas | Notes for CD "The Garland Variations" |
Backstage |
Definition of Stage Manager: The person who rarely gets credit when everything goes right. |
Anonymous | ||
Acting |
I don't make mistakes, I have unintentional improvisations. |
Anonymous | ||
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 | |
General |
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre. |
Antonin | Artaud | |
General, Playwriting |
Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy. |
Brooks | Atkinson | Theatre Arts Aug 56 |
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 | |
Playwriting |
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake. |
W.H. | Auden | |
General, Playwriting |
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name. |
Enid | Bagnold | |
Acting |
Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops. |
George P. | Baker | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgepba199310.html |
A play is a series of actions. A play is not about action, nor does it describe action. Is a fire about flames? Does it describe flames? No, a fire is flames. A play is action. Why do you think actors are called actors? And action in a play occurs when something happens that makes or permits something else to happen. |
David | Ball | Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays | |
Acting |
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Tallulah: My Autobiography |
Acting |
If you want to help the American theatre, don't be an actress, be an audience. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Playwriting |
A good play is a play which when acted upon the boards make an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play. |
Maurice | Baring | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Acting |
Acting is a matter of giving away secrets. |
Ellen | Barkin | |
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 |
The theatre has built a whole art round the actor, based on the man and his double - the actor and his character. |
Jean-Louis | Barrault | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
Acting |
An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow. |
Lawrence | Barrett | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
Playwriting |
I haven't really written my plays and books -- I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood. |
Sebastian | Barry | |
Acting |
For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros. |
Ethel | Barrymore | George Jean Nathan: The Theatre in the Fifties |
Costumes, Set Design |
Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. Routines have their purposes, but the merely routine is the hidden enemy of high art. [Advice to theatrical designers,] |
Cecil | Beaton | The Secret of How to Startle Theatre Arts May 57 |
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 |
Acting, Playwriting |
A play has two authors, the playwright and the actor. |
Eric | Bentley | In Search of Theater |
General, Management |
Someone once said that being an artistic director is the intelligent exercise of one's own taste. And that is what I believe with all my heart and soul. If you start second-guessing yourself in advance, I think you're done for. |
Andre | Bishop | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
General |
If politics is the art of the possible, theatre is the art of the impossible. |
Herbert | Blau | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Directing |
The truth is that there is no one accepted method for directing, any more than there is for any other art. How a director fares is greatly dependent on who that person is, his collaborators, and the project at hand. To complicate matters, the relationship between product and process isnt't always a direct and causal one. Some directors work themselves to the bone, while others do very little. Paradoxically, they achieve successes and failures in both categories. But it would be naive not to believe that most successful productions occur because of the intensive efforts of a skilled director. |
Michael | Bloom | Thinking Like a Director: A Practical Handbook |