Theater Quotes

• Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

  Alan Jay Lerner

  Criticism, Theatre, Coughing

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• Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

  William Ralph Inge

  Reflection, Theatre, Courses

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• Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

  Roman Polanski

  Movie, Inspiring, Humorous

  "Values of the Wise: Aspiring to 'The Life of Value'". Book by Jason Merchey, 2004.

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• 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

  Giving, Theatre, Suggestions

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

  Laurence Olivier

  Believe, Cities, Theatre

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

  Oscar Wilde

  Life, Art, Theatre

  Oscar Wilde (1997). “Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis”, p.1026, Wordsworth Editions

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• If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Want, Actresses, Helping

  "Tallulah: My Autobiography". Book by Tallulah Bankhead, 1952.

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• The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience, there is no theater. Everything done is ultimately for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, fellow players, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.

  Viola Spolin

  Meaningful, Player, Theatre

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

  Arthur Miller

  Theatre, Fascinating

  The New York Times, May 9, 1984.

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• It is in the irony of things that the theatre should be the most dangerous place for the actor. But, then, after all, the world is the worst possible place, the most corrupting place, for the human soul. And just as there is no escape from the world, which follows us into the very heart of the desert, so the actor cannot escape the theatre. And the actor who is a dreamer need not. All of us can only strive to remain uncontaminated. In the world we must be unworldly, in the theatre the actor must be untheatrical.

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Heart, Soul, Dreamer

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• The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.

  John Steinbeck

  Years, People, Dying

  John Steinbeck (2007). “Once There Was a War”, p.23, Penguin

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• The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

  Antonin Artaud

  Light, Order, Break Through

  "The Theatre and Its Double". Book by Antonin Artaud, 1938.

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• And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking.

  John Green

  Talking, People, Needs

  John Green, David Levithan (2010). “Will Grayson, Will Grayson”, p.102, Penguin

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• The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

  Stella Adler

  Mean, People, Greek

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• There are two kinds of directors in the theater. Those who think they are God and those who are certain of it.

  Rhetta Hughes

  Women, Memorable, Thinking

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• 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

  Fall, Mean, Exercise

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.79, Grove Press

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• The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.

  Tennessee Williams

  Jobs, Doors, People

  Tennessee Williams, Margaret Bradham Thornton (2006). “Notebooks”, p.682, Yale University Press

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• Theater helps people keep sane.

  Vanessa Redgrave

  People, Helping, Sane

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• The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

  Gore Vidal

  Theatre, Needs, Reminders

  Gore Vidal (1968). “Sex, Death, and Money”

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• Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite right. They will be.

  Agnes de Mille

  America, People, Agonizing

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• I just love, I love, I love movies.

  Laura Dern

  Movie Love, Movie Theater

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• A stage setting is not a background; it is an environment.

  Robert Edmond Jones

  Environment, Stage, Backgrounds

  Robert Edmond Jones (2004). “The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre”, p.3, Taylor & Francis

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• You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you're in another world

  Robert Caro

  Light, Doors, World

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• We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.

  Herman Wouk

  Drama, Eye, Black

  New York Times, June 2, 1985.

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• The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.

  Alfred Jarry

  Passion, Character, Theatre

  Alfred Jarry, Roger Shattuck, Simon Watson Taylor (1965). “Selected works: Edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor”

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