Top 100 Good Theater Quotes
#1. ... both spiritual teachers and preachers fall into the trap of using imprecise, emotional mumbo jumbo - if you can't define it or explain it, then it's mumbo jumbo - to connect with an audience. The audience reads into it what they want, and it makes for good theater.
Gudjon Bergmann
#2. I was really lucky for the friends that I had and loved every minute of it. I don't think I was a geek, but I loved the studies and we had a really good theater company at our school.
Jenna Coleman
#3. I had a good theater career for years. I played Hamlet when I was 22, and I've played some really great roles.
Jason Gann
#4. Young people have got to start their own theaters, really. All good theater is a kind of mom-and-pop operation. Start your own theater.
Terrence McNally
#5. You have to take away some of tax breaks for the wealthy, and you have to cut back on some entitlements. Because, unless we do all of these things, it just doesn't work. And what's good theater and what's good politics isn't necessarily good economic policy.
Michael Bloomberg
#7. Good theater should always send people away feeling changed.
Suzanne Farrell
#8. We all need to go to good theater; that is what I believe will save it.
Estelle Parsons
#9. Good theater is not what is expected, but what surprises.
Mae West
#10. I'm a theater guy at heart; I love the theater. I was lucky enough to spend a good decade and a half in the New York theater community.
Thomas Sadoski
#11. I'm a weird dichotomy of nerd, sports fan, and musical theater, so I'd love to do a superhero musical on Broadway. But all the good superheroes are claimed.
Taran Killam
#12. The good die young - but not always. The wicked prevail - but not consistently. I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre.
Helen Hayes
#13. I think my favorite place to eat dinner is the movie theater. Dirty dogs, a big thing of nachos and a Cherry Coke - and I'm good.
Chris Kirkpatrick
#14. When I go back to theater, I feel good about myself. When I do films or TV, it's to make a little bread to pay my mortgage or whatever, and when I've made the money, I do theater again. And when I get a part I like, a part I can work on, that satisfies me. I feed good about myself.
David Hedison
#15. DAY: I have a good job, a lovely apartment, I go out with very nice men to the best places, the finest restaurants, the theater. What am I missing? RITTER: If you hove to ask, believe me, you're missing it.
Doris Day
#16. Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
Gail Godwin
#17. I was terrible in my first play. After that experience, I had to face that I wasn't good enough to play with the big boys. I had to go away and learn, so I worked in regional theater for three years. I even understudied at the Kennedy Center.
Kevin Spacey
#18. Since I was 19, I've had the most fun possible every single day, even when I had a rough life. It was the army which taught me about life, and the theater which taught me how good it could be.
Michael Caine
#19. A theater is such a revealing form of art, such a transparent and good actors, they're such powerful individuals. I always kind of dreamt that one day I will open my mouth on stage.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#20. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
W. H. Auden
#21. It's all been a bad joke that just ran out of control. I got into food for fun but the business got a mind of its own. Now - my good Lord - look where it has gotten me. My products are on supermarket shelves, in cinemas, in the theater. And they say show business is odd.
Paul Newman
#22. I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.
Tom Stoppard
#23. And my editor, Tom Dupree, for his patience, enthusiasm, and shared good taste for loving Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Dan Simmons
#24. You pay to have a good time, you don't always want to pay to be schooled or sad or reminded how bad you got it. To me a movie theater ain't always the place for that.
Ice Cube
#25. Living in New York, I get excited by the idea of working in a different medium. And it's pretty frightening because whatever skills it takes to make a good piece of theater seem mysterious to me.
Cary Fukunaga
#26. There are a lot of wrong reasons to do a remake, but there are some good ones. I think it's human nature, in many ways, to retell our favorite stories. We do it in the theater, all the time. I've seen four different Hamlets, and every one has given me something different.
Joel Kinnaman
#27. My now-wife - we got together in '81, we married a few years after - she's been very good in the past about going in the theater with me to see actresses I had known. But then, she's not an actress.
Tom Courtenay
#28. I'm a really good team player. That's what it takes to work in the theater. That's what it takes to work in a band with musicians and writers.
David Cassidy
#29. My father was a professor of folklore, and my mother was a teacher until she was married. I had a good relationship with them, and the only argument we had was when I went to university and wanted to go into the theater instead of studying to be a lawyer.
Max Von Sydow
#30. Any show that's bringing in a young audience is doing a good thing, because that's the only way that theater will continue to grow. All the other audience members are going to be dead soon!
Adam Pascal
#31. My goal was not to be famous or rich but to be good at what I did. And that required going to New York and studying and working in the theater.
Shirley Knight
#32. The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.
Michael J. Fox
#33. Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything that is good in me.
Charlotte Bronte
#34. I never leave a piece of theater that I love and say, 'That was a good point; They made a good point.' I leave, and I feel something.
Paul Downs Colaizzo
#35. I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#36. The very first things that I did, even in theater, were bad guys. They are meaty roles for the most part. With the bad guy you have more freedom to experiment and go further out than with a good guy.
Benicio Del Toro
#37. I remember I made $22 a week doing dinner theater in Norfolk, Virginia. Back then, in the '70s, that was pretty good for a teenager, for a part-time job.
Stephen Furst
#38. The Jewish culture - people that are Jewish have a certain cultural habit that they've formed and one of those habits is an appreciation of theater and music - these are cultural things one does associate with values that are promulgated by Jewish families. I think that's a good thing.
Woody Allen
#39. The theater's been very good to me and I became Julie Halston through the theater.
Julie Halston
#40. The good news is that 'High School Musical' seems to be getting a lot of youngsters excited about theater.
Terry Teachout
#41. I was going to middle school in Berkley, and I did not fit in at all. Like a lot of kids, I found theater to be a good place for me.
Curtis Armstrong
#42. Get in theater, really work your craft. Get really, really good so that when people say your name, your name is associated with quality, with integrity.
Freddy Rodriguez
#43. I am a theater girl, and a lot of theater girls dress however pleases them. I wear whatever looks good on me. I wear what I wear because I have been shopping at thrift stores since I was five.
Kirsten Vangsness
#44. I was as happy doing theater in New York for little or no money as I am now doing television for more money. The happiness, I guess, comes out of it being a good job. The success has to do with the fact that it's a good job that will continue.
David Hyde Pierce
#45. Some people that work for Hot Pockets came to my Denver Paramount Theater show. They brought these hot pocket boxes the size of suit cases for me to sign. I wrote "these are WMD's" on the boxes. The HP people seem to have a good sense of humor about all of it.
Jim Gaffigan
#46. Acting goes back a little ways for me. I supposed I started with theater growing up. It was mainly a social outlet and it was just kind of something I did for fun. I met a lot of good friends through it, so it really kept me involved.
David Lambert
#47. I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.
Keith Haring
#48. When you left this one theater in Norfolk, the actors had to walk through the lobby to get out to the street. People would see you and say nice things, tell you that you were good. So, pretty soon I'm pretending to forget things backstage, going through the lobby a couple of times.
Stephen Furst
#49. The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people.
Tony Kushner
#50. I used to do lots of independent films and for a while I was very content living in New York City and doing independent movies and off-Broadway theater. I loved it, I had a really good time doing that, and I worked on a lot of projects that are very dear to my heart, both plays and films.
Jared Harris
#51. A good ending is vital to a picture, the single most important element, because it is what the audience takes with them out of the theater.
Walt Disney
#52. Both my parents said they never got so many emails from friends and colleagues - with all the theater work that I've done - than when I was on 'The Good Wife.'
Sarah Steele
#53. That's why I love doing live theater more than anything: You get an immediate reaction, whether it's good or bad.
Jane Krakowski
#54. I'm a good example of wanting to apologize only for my precise share of a problem
as I calculate it, of course
and I expect my husband Steve to apologize for his share, also as I calculate it. Since we're not always of one mind on the math, it can lead to the theater of the absurd.
Harriet Lerner
#55. I really wanted to go to a city and get involved in a theater scene and a theater community. I had some friends who had moved out to Chicago and had said really good things about it and about the work. I didn't care at that time about making money.
Timothy Simons
#56. Good live theater disturbs molecules. You create an energy source around yourself and it alternates between you and the audience. Anybody who sees live theater should come out a little rearranged.
Glenn Close
#57. I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
Aasif Mandvi
#58. Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.
David Byrne
#59. It would have been a great story if Brooks had went out there and scored 21 points, ... That would have been great theater. But the reality of that is very difficult, as we know, in this league for any QB when defense is playing good. And the Ravens played well.
Herman Edwards
#60. Miramax can buy a small independent movie that isn't very good, but because it has great relationships with different theaters, it can get into a big theater.
Marguerite Moreau
#61. In my theater days I assumed that you had to get rid of yourself to do a character well, and I don't think I was a very good actor when I did that.
Charlie Day
#62. I think I'm kind of attracted to the material more than the medium. I'm not opposed to doing a television show, though. I actually think there are a couple of good ones. And there is some terrible theater. Film is a very different kind of acting.
Dan Futterman
#63. I have never read a review for anything I have ever done, be it for theater or movies, just because. I am really good about that. And YouTube comments. People will hide behind that.
Skylar Astin
#64. You must not demand the failure of your peers, because the more good things that are around in film, in television, in theater - why the better it is for all of us.
Jerome Lawrence
#65. I feel that doing theater does give you a good grounding to work on camera. The audience is the lens.
Julian Ovenden
#66. My American accent is really, really good. I started out in the theater, doing all different characters with all different accents. When I first came to America, I thought I would be playing American, all the time. It was just weird how it worked out that I played more international characters.
Rebel Wilson
#67. The truth of the matter is that I have lasted a long time, and with it comes both good and bad things. One of the good things is that no one can ever take my career away from me. No one can ever say, 'You can't be in the theater any more.'
Harold Prince
#68. I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.
Orson Welles
#69. I always think if it's a good story, the audience can't wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting.
Steven Spielberg
#70. I've never really felt good at the parties, but I have enough friends now that I feel social, I used to feel very antisocial, but I think the theater helps.
Adam Rapp
#71. Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.
Tony Kushner
#72. I think people want to stay home and run movies with their whole family at home. It become a family hobby instead of going out to the theater, sad to say. But I think it's very good because it reaches millions that would never see these movies.
Debbie Reynolds
#73. I am a lucky regional theater actor who happened to get a good role.
James Marsters
#74. My deep dark secret is that I was a nerd in school. I liked the theater. I liked to study. I wasn't very good at sports.
Rob Lowe
#75. I understood that I was not the best director in the world nor the worst director in the world. I realized that there is a very mysterious element to what works and what doesn't work in the theater. And it's good to know that from the beginning.
Joe Mantello
#76. I don't consider myself a great actress. I'm just trying to stay alive, actually. I think I'm good, and I've learned a lot, certainly, mostly in the theater. I've been sloughed off movies for years. But what can you do? That's life.
Lauren Bacall
#77. Whatever is done without ostentation, and without the people being witnesses of it, is, in my opinion, most praiseworthy: not that the public eye should be entirely avoided, for good actions desire to be placed in the light; but notwithstanding this, the greatest theater for virtue is conscience.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#78. I came up in the theater, and I learned pretty quickly that reading a review, whether it's good or bad, can strangely affect the next performances, because you're reacting to something that's been said about you. So I tend to avoid that stuff pretty studiously.
Dallas Roberts
#79. I have no problems with remakes, and I think it's interesting. I mean, coming from the theater, we've been remaking 'Hamlet' for a hundred years, so it's no problem to me at all. A good story can be told in many different ways in different places; I just think it's interesting.
Baltasar Kormakur
#80. I know for a fact the reason I'm an actor is because one, two, maybe three people when I was younger saw something that I did, in youth theater or some small play somewhere, and said, "You're good."
David Oyelowo
#81. It's good to learn early that every show is a family
complete with dysfunctional relationships, tough love, and plenty of occasion for forgiveness ...
Kristin Chenoweth
#82. My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.
Adam Driver
#83. He seems like a good guy, but we need to focus on finding Nia's killer, and then finish the theater. We don't have time for distractions. No men."
"Yeah, yeah, I know." Mel rolled her eyes.
"Inspiration before intercourse."
Callie chuckled. "I should put that on a T-shirt.
Lisa Kessler
#84. Of course I wanted an agent from the time I was like 5, but my mother was like, 'No, you're going to be normal, you're going to go to school, you're going to get good grades, you're going to play soccer, and if you do well, if you keep your grades up, you can do one community-theater show a year.'
Laura Benanti
#85. I think I can work anywhere, but you don't get the same kind of inspiration everywhere. New York theater has become a big inspiration for me. I only started writing for the stage myself because I like to see the good, mostly off-Broadway plays in New York.
Daniel Kehlmann
#86. I think actors have a huge responsibility because of the vastness of their outreach. I am a big believer of the good that film, television, and theater can do, and I want to be a part of that. Throughout my career, I want to keep telling amazing stories and inspiring people.
Roberto Aguire
#87. I've auditioned for animation stuff for a long time; that's a tough field to crack into. I don't think I have the strongest voice. I don't have a theater-trained voice or a radio voice, but I think I make good character choices.
Brian Huskey
#88. My agents and my managers are very good at whittling things down to the things they think I would be good at and that I'd respond well to, and that includes theater, TV and film. Whatever it is, if the material is right for me, then I'll go for it.
Dominic Sherwood
#89. In theater, they say a theater piece is only as good as its transitions.
Reggie Watts
#90. Not to toot our own horn, but when 'The Sopranos' was on, it was as good as any movie that was coming out in the theater. I think that goes for a lot of shows today.
Michael Imperioli
#91. All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.
Jack Bowman
#92. Good'?" my aunt said. "Children are good. Dogs are good. This is theater, Jane.
Melissa Bank
#93. As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
August Wilson
#94. I've actually seen a good amount of the shows at Lincoln Center Theater. I went to school right across the street at Juilliard, so some of the first stuff I got to see here in New York was at the Lincoln Center Theater. I've always been inspired by the work that they do.
Seth Numrich
#95. Comics, as good as they might be, they didn't know much about performance. There aren't too many comics you could watch for an hour without getting tired. They might have good material, but it's about theater to me.
Andrew Dice Clay
#96. I'm a theater actress and I thrive on working with other actors, and you can't be even a smidge bad, when you're acting with Charlie [Sheen]. He's just so natural, so present and so good that you have to step up to his level, or else.
Daniela Bobadilla
#97. You go where you think it's good for your work and your soul to go. I need to go someplace where I am reminded about why I wanted to act in the first place, and for me, that's the theater.
Patricia Richardson
#98. In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you're good, but on the screen you can't really fool anyone for a second.
Gloria Swanson
#99. Whether I'm directing live action or animation, my responsibility is the same. I have an audience sitting in a theater with their popcorn, and I've got to show them a good time and make them feel something.
Lee Unkrich
#100. Producers want to put their music behind revivals but I don't think that's a good trend for the theater at all.
Harold Prince
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