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Theatre Quotes

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Displaying 381 - 400 of 425
  • " 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


  • " Actors are the only honest hypocrites."

    - William Hazlitt


  • " The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted."

    - Voltaire


  • " The play loses a great deal of its meaning if it is robbed of a magic which springs, not from the glittering tip of a department-store wand, but from the earth, the stones, the very air of the wood; and a magic which is not merely pretty but dark and dangerous. [said of A Midsummer Night's Dream"

    - Tyrone Guthrie


  • " If no single reason can fully account for the lack of great work on Broadway these days, there is a factor in the discussion that is rarely mentioned but which has a bearing on what gets produced: the audience. . . It's not audience intelligence that has waned; it's audience passion -- the pro forma Broadway standing ovation now springs from duty not desire. . . If that passion exists more in the audience for The Lord of the Rings than for contemporary Broadway musicals, well, at least it is alive somewhere."

    - Brendan Lemon

    Source: http://www.curtainup.com/timelyquotes.html


  • " I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds."

    - Wallace Shawn

    Source: http://www.curtainup.com/timelyquotes.html


  • " A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships."

    - Gore Vidal

    Source: http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre


  • " 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

    Source: http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre


  • " The world's a theater, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill."

    - Thomas Heywood

    Source: http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre


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

    - Oliver Goldsmith

    Source: http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre


  • " When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting."

    - Steve Buscemi

    Source: http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre


  • " 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

    Source: http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm


  • " An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow."

    - Lawrence Barrett

    Source: http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm


  • " Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an interpretive one."

    - Paul Newman

    Source: http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm


  • " You need three things in the theatre -- the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something."

    - Kenneth Haigh

    Source: http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm


  • " In my plays I want to look at life -- at the commonplace of existence -- as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time."

    - Christopher Fry

    Source: http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm


  • " The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."

    - Arthur Miller

    Source: http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm


  • " Act well your part; there all the honor lies."

    - Alexander Pope

    Source: Essay on Man, Epistle iv, line 193


  • " The secret of staying fresh in a show is to remember that the audience you're playing for that night has never seen it before."

    - Danny Kaye


  • " What is the main problem of the actor? It is to keep the audience awake, and not let them go to sleep, then wake up and go home feeling they've wasted their money."

    - Laurence Olivier