Theatre Quotes
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- " Drama should not present new stories but new relationships."
- Frederick Hessel
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard."
- Anton Chekhov
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " Failure in the theatre is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty."
- Lillian Hellman
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " If the nature of human experience changes with the color of a man's skin, then the racists have been right all along."
- Athol Fugard
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process."
- Paula Vogel
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression."
- Harold Pinter
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " This is a non-commercial theatre. It's got to be run by a person who sees right from the start that the profits won't be money profits. [On the idea of a Federal Theatre Project, 1934]"
- Harry Hopkins
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " This is an extremely foolish and stupid and idiotic kind of attitude--to expect theatres to make money. Do the public schools make money? Do libraries make money? Does the zoo make money? Do the sewers make money? It's a community service."
- John Hirsch
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " How do you teach someone that a theatre comes about first as an idea, from an individual who has a philosophy and a passion? That a theatre's idea is its heart and individual soul? That the person who creates it must have the desire not only to create work, but also to create the conditions in which that work can live--and in which others can do it as well? How do you teach someone to want to be a midwife as well as a mother."
- Robert Kalfin
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " 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
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " The artistic director gratifies his special need to relate to people in a highly accentuated paternalistic and maternalistic fashion."
- Philip Weissman
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write."
- Tennessee Williams
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case."
- David Mamet
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " It isn't what I do, but how I do it. It isn't what I say but how I say it - and how I look when I do and say it."
- Mae West
- " An effective lighting design is like a beautiful painting. Your medium is bringing someone to an emotional state he or she would not achieve at that moment without your art. This does not and can not happen by accident."
- Glen Cunningham
Source: Stage Lighting Revealed
- " A flop is often the result of the fact that each of the talents involved, while working on the same project, may in effect have been working on a different show from all the others. If all contributors do not share the same vision of the evening, the end product will not evince the harmony of diverse elements--the seeming inevitability of book, score, and staging--of a good musical."
- Ethan Mordden
Source: Not Since Carrie
- " There is a traditional trick that theatre people have played as long as I can remember. A veteran member of a company will order a gullible newcomer to find the key to the curtain. Naturally, the joke is there is no such thing. I have been in the theatre over fifty years, and I don't think anyone would consider me naive, but all my life I've been searching for that key. And I'm still looking. . . ."
- Richard Rodgers
Source: Musical Stages
- " A nonprofessional theatre is, simply, one comprised of people who do not derive their income from it and do not spend most of their time engaged in it. There are two distinct categories: (1) nonprofessional groups that present plays with some regularity; and (2) nonprofessional groups that are organized on a one-time basis to present a play or a show for some special purpose. The former represents what is known as community theatre, and the latter falls under the heading of amateur theatre (though both types are amateur, or nonprofessional)."
- Stephen Langley
Source: Theatre Management & Production in America
- " I started writing for the theatre because I hated it."
- Eugene Ionesco
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage."
- Anton Chekhov
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips