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Theatre Quotes

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Displaying 281 - 300 of 425
  • " If you cried a little less, the audience would cry more."

    - Edith Evans

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Have a very good reason for everything you do."

    - Laurence Olivier

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Play well, or play badly, but play truly."

    - Konstantin Stanislavsky

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture."

    - Spencer Tracy

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Whatever you do kid, always serve it with a little dressing."

    - George M. Cohan

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Use your weaknesses; aspire to the strength."

    - Laurence Olivier

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Pray to God and say the lines."

    - Bette Davis

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Act in your pauses."

    - Ellen Terry

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " If you want to help the American theatre, don't be an actress, be an audience."

    - Tallulah Bankhead

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " When you go into the professional world, at a stock theater somewhere, backstage you will meet an older actor--someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes about life in the theater. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man."

    - Sanford Meisner

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Don't think you're funny. It'll never work if you think you're funny."

    - George Abbott

    Source: Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur


  • " Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one."

    - Robert Brustein

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


  • " To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner."

    - Eleanora Duse

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


  • " The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout."

    - Robert Holman

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


  • " 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


  • " 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


  • " The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name."

    - Enid Bagnold


  • " The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent."

    - Robert Brustein


  • " The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts."

    - David Hare


  • " Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising."

    - Vaclav Havel