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Theatre Quotes

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Displaying 301 - 320 of 425
  • " A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten."

    - David Mamet


  • " A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great."

    - Arthur Miller


  • " Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute."

    - John Mortimer


  • " Good drama must be drastic."

    - Friedrich Schlegel


  • " 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


  • " 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


  • " Theater is so critical because it has always been able to release people from their isolation... The theater is a communal event, church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is just the longings of one heart."

    - Marsha Norman


  • " The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots."

    - Alfred Jarry

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


  • " I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre."

    - Barrie Keefe

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


  • " By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings."

    - Arthur Miller

    Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Miller


  • " It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times."

    - William Prynne

    Source: http://izquotes.com/


  • " I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere."

    - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

    Source: http://www.brainyquote.com/


  • " In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple."

    - J.M. Synge

    Source: http://www.brainyquote.com/


  • " Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."

    - Rod Serling

    Source: http://www.brainyquote.com


  • " Theater is life, film is art, television is furniture."

    - Unknown


  • " You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you."

    - Ben Kingsley


  • " All the world's a stage. Some of us just have better seats."

    - Unknown


  • " Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be. You can't be eight times a week without going stark staring mad. You've got to be in control."

    - Noel Coward


  • " 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


  • " If politics is the art of the possible, theatre is the art of the impossible."

    - Herbert Blau

    Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips