Quotes about theater




These are quotes tagged with "theater". You can also search for quotes containing the word theater.

"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."

Artaud, Antonin on theater    Share

"The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name."

Bagnold, Enid on theater    Share

"It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman."

Bankhead, Tallulah on theater    Share

"I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly."

Barker, Howard on theater    Share

"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."

Brecht, Bertolt on theater    Share

"Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one."

Brustein, Robert on theater    Share

"The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent."

Brustein, Robert on theater    Share

"For my part, I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about and finding out one's acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage. One merely comes to meet one's friends, and show that one's alive."

Burney, Fanny on theater    Share

"The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics."

Clurman, Harold on theater    Share

"I just love, I love, I love movies."

Dern, Laura on theater    Share

"The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled."

Diderot, Denis on theater    Share

"I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me."

Duncan, Isadora on theater    Share

"The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts."

Hare, David on theater    Share

"Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising."

Havel, Vaclav on theater    Share

"I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect."

Havel, Vaclav on theater    Share

"The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout."

Holman, Robert on theater    Share

"To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large."

James, Henry on theater    Share

"The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots."

Jarry, Alfred on theater    Share

"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."

Jarry, Alfred on theater    Share

"The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live."

Johnson, Samuel on theater    Share

"I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre."

Keeffe, Barrie on theater    Share

"A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten."

Mamet, David on theater    Share

"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."

Mille, Agnes De on theater    Share

"A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great."

Miller, Arthur on theater    Share

"Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute."

Mortimer, John on theater    Share

"My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive."

Paltrow, Gwyneth on theater    Share

"It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times."

Prynne, William on theater    Share

"The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form."

Santayana, George on theater    Share

"Good drama must be drastic."

Schlegel, Friedrich on theater    Share

"In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on theater    Share

"I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere."

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley on theater    Share

"All this class of pleasures inspires me with the same nausea as I feel at the sight of rich plum-cake or sweetmeats; I prefer the driest bread of common life."

Smith, Sydney on theater    Share

"In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple."

Synge, J. M. on theater    Share

"If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps."

Thurber, James on theater    Share

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

Vidal, Gore on theater    Share

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