Theatre famous quotes

I grew up in musical theatre and love to perform on stage.
-- A. J. McLean

#Musical #Theatre #And Love

I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.
-- Ajay Naidu

#Theatre #Definitions #Paint

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.
-- Akira Kurosawa

#Theatre #Together #Cinema

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?
-- Al Pacino

#Theatre

Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.
-- Alan Ayckbourn

#Play #Theatre #Audience

Scottish Theatre's greatest success story of recent times.
-- Alan Chadwick

#Theatre #Stories #Scottish

I was so scared of going back to the theatre after 'Hamlet.' I didn't know if I'd do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it.
-- Alan Cumming

#Play #Theatre #Scared

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.
-- Alan Jay Lerner

#Criticism #Theatre #Coughing

Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over.
-- Alan Rickman

#Theatre #Acting #Nerves

Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.
-- Alan Rickman

#Focus #Listening #Theatre

Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theatre?
-- Alanis Morissette

#Theatre #Quality

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.
-- Albert Finney

#Memories #Character #Theatre

Best performance of the year: Aston Villa v. Milan, September 1994
-- Alec Guinness

#Years #Theatre #Villa

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity.
-- Alec Guinness

#Opportunity #Theatre #Phrases

I really look up to actors like Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett who have a strong background in theatre.
-- Alexa Vega

#Strong #Theatre #Looks

It seems to me that you are solving a problem which goes beyond the limits of physiology in too simple a way. Physiology has realized its problem with fortitude, breaking man down into endless actions and counteractions and reducing him to a crossing, a vortex of reflex acts. Let it now permit sociology to restore him as a whole. Sociology will wrest man from the anatomical theatre and return him to history.
-- Alexander Herzen

#Simple #Men #Theatre

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.
-- Alexander Pope

#Lying #Theatre #Deceit

The theatre and traveling through my modeling jobs, all of those experiences have helped a lot actually.
-- Alexis Bledel

#Jobs #Theatre #Modeling

The entire universe is a great theatre of mirrors.
-- Alice Bailey

#Law Of Attraction #Mirrors #Theatre

The creation of the UCB Theatre is by far my proudest professional accomplishment.
-- Amy Poehler

#Accomplishment #Theatre #Creation

The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.
-- Andrei Tarkovsky

#Theatre #Needs #Action

When I was at drama school I wanted to do classical theatre. It just so happened that I did a film when I came out and I moved that way.
-- Andrew Lincoln

#Drama #School #Theatre

I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this.
-- Andrew Lloyd Webber

#Relationship #Thinking #Theatre

The regrets in the theatre have always been the shows that you know ought to have worked but for one reason or another haven't.
-- Andrew Lloyd Webber

#Regret #Theatre #Reason

As an actor, particularly in theatre, you're trying to get jobs on TV; but you're also losing jobs in theatre to people who are on television.
-- Andrew Rannells

#Jobs #People #Theatre

Nevertheless, in the theatre, and in the cinema, the contemporary reality of Poland has been represented only to a minuscule degree in the last 12 years.
-- Andrzej Wajda

#Reality #Years #Theatre

At the same time, television theatre became more visibly active.
-- Andrzej Wajda

#Theatre #Television #Active

It was progressively more difficult to find work in the theatre, as well.
-- Andrzej Wajda

#Theatre #Difficult #Wells

Television theatre, as is implied in its name, should rely on adaptations of scripts written for the theatre.
-- Andrzej Wajda

#Names #Theatre #Television

On the one hand, young theatre directors were coming to television theatre, because they wanted to get closer to the cinema, despite having studied and worked for the theatre.
-- Andrzej Wajda

#Hands #Theatre #Directors

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Differences #Theatre #Energy

I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.
-- Andy Serkis

#Believe #Thinking #Theatre

I grew up overseas in Indonesia, and my school had a great art, music, and theatre program.
-- Angela Kinsey

#Art #School #Theatre

I listened to a lot of tapes of British theatre actresses and tried to learn from them. As Americans, we don't have such a gift with language.
-- Angelina Jolie

#Theatre #Tape #Actresses

I have to say my background was mostly theatre, which I love, and it took a long time to feel comfortable there. That's probably true of anyone's career.
-- Ann Dowd

#Careers #Long #Theatre

In the theatre, if you say 'Macbeth', all the actors will start looking very anxious. I'm so well-trained not to say it in the theatre that I can hardly say it in normal life.
-- Anna Chancellor

#Theatre #Actors #Normal

I was never the class clown or anything like that. When I was growing up and doing theatre in Seattle I was always doing very dramatic work. Now I can't get a dramatic role to save my life!
-- Anna Faris

#Growing Up #Class #Theatre

When I play, I feel like in a theatre, why should I look ugly then, because I'm a tennis player?
-- Anna Kournikova

#Player #Tennis #Theatre

In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
-- Anne Bogart

#Memories #Past #Theatre

The object is freedom.
-- Anne Bogart

#Theatre

In theatre, there's the director, the writer, and below them the actor. In film, it's the actors who are most important. That goes against the grain for me.
-- Anne-Marie Duff

#Important #Theatre #Directors

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
-- Anthony Burgess

#Class #Differences #Theatre

Acting's entertainment. It's not brain surgery.
-- Anthony Hopkins

#Brain #Theatre #Acting

I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.
-- Anton Chekhov

#Theatre #Conventions #Stage

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.
-- Antonin Artaud

#Order #Theatre #Passionate

Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.
-- Antonin Artaud

#Distance #Theatre #Danger

Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.
-- Antonin Artaud

#Eye #Theatre #Battle

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
-- Antonin Artaud

#Theatre #Diligence #Cruelty

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
-- Antonin Artaud

#Theatre #Brothels

Im now projecting my career in a totally different direction. I am going to work less-way less. And I want to work better. I want to direct again, I want to do more theatre, and I want to do exactly those movies that I want to do.
-- Antonio Banderas

#Careers #Theatre #Different

I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.
-- Antony Sher

#Sorry #Opportunity #Theatre

I hate the word 'production'. It's a ceremony, a ritual - you should go out of the theatre more human than when you went in.
-- Ariane Mnouchkine

#Hate #Theatre #Should

Music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it.
-- Aristotle

#Character #Soul #Theatre

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.
-- Arnold Bennett

#Reading #People #Theatre

Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

#Technology #Magic #Theatre

When I was young, my mum was part of a brilliant puppet theatre that toured all over the world.
-- Arthur Darvill

#Theatre #World #Puppets

The Globe' is one of the most terrifying theatres in London. It's that mob element - everyone packed in and staring up at you.
-- Arthur Darvill

#Theatre #Elements #London

We have a desperate need for producers in the [commercial Broadway] theatre, and it is very hard for them to get money and find investors for new plays.
-- Arthur Laurents

#Play #Theatre #Needs

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
-- Arthur Miller

#Theatre #Theater

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
-- Arthur Miller

#Men #Theatre #Serious

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public. . . . The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.
-- Arthur Miller

#Humanity #Theatre #Crafts

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theatre, or the play - but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.
-- Arthur Miller

#Thinking #Play #Theatre

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Children #Lying #Theatre

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.
-- Athol Fugard

#People #Theatre #Fascination

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

#Men #Color #Theatre

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.
-- August Strindberg

#Ideas #Theatre #Form

I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.
-- August Wilson

#Believe #Reality #Theatre

Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.
-- Augusto Boal

#Mean #Waiting #Theatre

The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!).
-- Augusto Boal

#Theatre #Actors #Usage

The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!
-- Augusto Boal

#Character #Thinking #Theatre

When does a session of The Theatre of the Oppressed end? Never – since the objective is not to close a cycle, to generate a catharsis, or to end a development. On the contrary, its objective is to encourage autonomous activity, to set a process in motion, to stimulate transformative creativity, to change spectators into protagonists. And it is precisely for these reasons that the Theatre of the Oppressed should be the initiator of changes the culmination of which is not the aesthetic phenomenon but real life.
-- Augusto Boal

#Real #Creativity #Theatre

Theatre is a weapon. For that reason it must be fought for.
-- Augusto Boal

#Theatre #Weapons #Reason

Theatre is the art of looking at ourselves.
-- Augusto Boal

#Art #Theatre

Theatre is the most perfect artistic form of coercion.
-- Augusto Boal

#Perfect #Theatre #Coercion

In the theater, I've found that, in general, reaction and laughter come easier at an evening performance, when the audience is more inclined to forget its troubles. Matinee customers must enter the theatre in a more matter-of-fact frame of mind, hanging on tightly before they let themselves go.
-- Beatrice Lillie

#Laughter #Mind #Theatre

But, you see, the theatre is not always art in America.
-- Beatrice Wood

#Art #America #Theatre

Theatre is where my passion lies - I just love it. I love watching it, and I love doing it.
-- Ben Daniels

#Lying #Passion #Theatre

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.
-- Ben Kingsley

#Years #Theatre #Actors

I have mainly come from a theatre background, I did 'Oliver' here I played the Artful Dodger and I did 'The Sound of Music.
-- Ben Nicholas

#Theatre #Sound #Sound Of Music

I coach young people. I have a group called BTP - Broadway Theatre Project.
-- Ben Vereen

#People #Theatre #Groups

One of the things I find very difficult about theatre is the repetition - that something can slide away from your original intentions.
-- Ben Whishaw

#Theatre #Slides #Intention

I trained as a theatre actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.
-- Benicio Del Toro

#Theatre #Actors #Middle

From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun.
-- Bertolt Brecht

#Fun #People #Theatre

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
-- Bertolt Brecht

#Feelings #Historical #Theatre

Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster. Psychologically the situation is analogous to that of people trampled to death when there is a panic in a theatre caused by a cry of `Fire!'.
-- Bertrand Russell

#Fire #People #Theatre

I tried to start a theatre in LA and failed miserably, but I was probably not meant to raise money
-- Beth Henley

#Theatre #Raises

Pray to God and say the lines.
-- Bette Davis

#Theatre #Lines #Praying

I went to the Glasgow Youth Theatre and they just let me in. But I was so shy that I was there for about six weeks without actually introducing myself.
-- Bill Forsyth

#Theatre #Shy #Six

I think in the old days, everybody used to act really quickly because Hollywood was built by theatre people.
-- Bill Nighy

#Thinking #People #Theatre

You learn more discipline in the theatre than you do in movies or TV. You're on stage every night and you have to sustain your energy level tor several hours.
-- Blythe Danner

#Night #Discipline #Theatre

When I see someone filming me, I don't usually think, 'No, man, don't put this up online!' I'd think, 'Hey man, you don't get to go to shows very often, put down the camera and enjoy it!' I love going to theatre and to shows so much.
-- Bo Burnham

#Men #Thinking #Theatre

There's a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre.
-- Boman Irani

#Years #Play #Theatre

We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema - some actors don't like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.
-- Boris Spassky

#Theatre #Cinema #Actors

I've done a lot of costume drama and theatre - the National Theatre and In fact, most of my work at the theatre, at the National Theatre anyway, was period.
-- Brenda Blethyn

#Drama #Theatre #Done

Everyone the world over talks about British actors and British talent and I think thats because we were trained - until now - in theatre.
-- Brenda Blethyn

#Thinking #Theatre #Actors

I almost failed drama at school. I hated it. It was all about the history of theatre.
-- Brenton Thwaites

#Drama #School #Theatre

The idea of doing theatre always terrified me because I get terrible stage fright. In the early 1970s I was offered a panto but the thought of going on stage was just too mortifying.
-- Britt Ekland

#Ideas #Theatre #Stage

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.
-- Brooks Atkinson

#Crazy #Play #Theatre

Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.
-- Brooks Atkinson

#People #Theatre #Sides

Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.
-- C. L. R. James

#Ballet #Theatre #Opera