Theatre Quotes

“Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.”
― Constantin Stanislavski, My Life In Art

“We're actors — we're the opposite of people!”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Act well your part; there all the honour lies.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

“Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good.”
― Terrence Mann

“What is that unforgettable line?”
― Samuel Beckett

“If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?

Beatrice: Is it possible disdain should die while she hath
such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ...

Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“I know. In fact, I am never wrong.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“An actor must never be afraid to make a fool of himself.”
― Harvey Cocks

“It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs.”
― Roman Payne

“VIVA LA VIE BOHEME!”
― Jonathan Larson, Rent

“people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.”
― Catherine Tate

“Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in.”
― Stephen Sondheim

“If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.”
― William Shakespeare

“Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Acting is in everything but the words.”
― Stella Adler, The Art of Acting

“Honest to God, this is the absolute best kind of moment. The auditorium lights are off except for ones over the stage, and we're all bright eyed and giggle-drunk. I fall a little bit in love with everyone.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
and Robin shall restore amends.”
― William Shakespaeare

“Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.”
― Stella Adler, The Art of Acting

“Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“The closer they come to transcending technique and the memorization of lines--the closer to really beginning to act, in short--the more Chinese they begin to seem. Happy now approaches Miss Forsythe to pick her up in the restaurant with a wonderful formality, his back straight, head high, his hand-gestures even more precise and formal, but with a comic undertone that ironically comes closer to conveying the original American idea of the scene than when he was trying to be physically sloppy and "relaxed"--that is, imitating an American. I think that by some unplanned magic we may end up creating something not quite American or Chinese but a pure style springing from the heart of the play itself--the play as a nonnational event, that is, a human circumstance.”
― Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing

“How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.”
― Christiaan Huygens, Cosmotheoros: or, conjectures concerning the inhabitants of the planets

“It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings—the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, Creating A Role

“God is fucking stealing souls again!”
― Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot