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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• 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 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 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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• 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 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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• Theater helps people keep sane.

  Vanessa Redgrave

  People, Helping, Sane

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• The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

  Thornton Wilder

  Real, Drama, Eye

  1961 In the New York Times, 6 Nov.

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• Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Mirrors, Toilets

  Arthur Schopenhauer (1902*). “Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: Selected and Translated by T. Bailey Saunders”

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• Theater going is a communal act, movie going a solitary one.

  Robert Brustein

  Theatre, Solitary

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• People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

  Don DeLillo

  Power, People, Literature

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.84, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.

  George Jean Nathan

  Girl, Long, Literature

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• No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

  Kenneth Tynan

  Theatre, Connections, World

  "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith, The New York Times, archive.nytimes.com. January 09, 1966.

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• Art, in the widest sense of the word, is the instrument Hellenism has used and would use for that purpose. All the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visual arts, the theatre, must work singly and together to create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, the free man.

  Bernard Berenson

  Art, Men, Together

  "Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts".

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• Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.

  Jenna Elfman

  People, Interesting, Week

  Interview with Todd Gilchrist, www.ign.com. June 15, 2006.

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• The show can go on without me, and probably will, but I want to come back to act in Chicago. My wife and I just bought a condo downtown, and I want to do theater.

  William Petersen

  Wife, Chicago, Downtown

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• This...is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Age, Anachronism, Specialization

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