John Lahr Quotes

#1. A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

John Lahr

#2. In 1957, 'West Side Story' had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; 'Bye Bye Birdie,' set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.

John Lahr

#3. I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

John Lahr

#4. If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us-secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.

Elizabeth Lesser

#5. 'The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak.

John Lahr

#6. I believe the human spirit is indomitable ...

Monty Oum

#7. The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents.

John Lahr

#8. My mother has only just got over the fact that I will never play Shrek's sister - because of the Scottish accent, she thought I'd be perfect.

Ashley Jensen

#9. I feel like my job is to give hope. The world is in a dark place and we are living in somewhat of a nightmare. So I want to make films to give hope.

Hany Abu-Assad

#10. Blind Willie Johnson is a pretty big vocal influence. He can be very harsh, like gargly, gruff vocals, but also just slip into some very delicate, vulnerable soft stuff. I like that combination.

Benjamin Booker

#11. Having love and not giving it is just as difficult as not having love and needing it

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#12. Of the modern critics, although I disagree with almost everything she says, I admire Mary McCarthy's eloquence and social observation in 'Sights and Spectacles'; she thinks in print, but she doesn't have a real feel for the stage.

John Lahr

#13. Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.

John Lahr

#14. His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg.

John Lahr

#15. Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.

John Lahr

#16. I detest literature. I abominate the theatre. I have a horror of culture. I am only interested in magic!

John Lahr

#17. Great Canadian comics are often outsiders and insiders at the same time. That's a great perspective for a comedian.

David Steinberg

#18. Digital imaging is as much about chemistry as it is about semiconductors.

Antonio Perez

#19. Criticism is a life without risk.

John Lahr

#20. When Elvis made his mass-media debut on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' - his notorious gyrations filmed only from the waist up - I fell off the family chaise longue with delight.

John Lahr

#21. We are torn between the craving to know and the despair of having known.

Francoise Sagan

#22. In the early stages of writing children's books, an experienced lady editor said that while girls read boys' books, the converse was not true, and I may have been influenced by that.

John Christopher

#23. 'Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

John Lahr

#24. In life, I'd much rather have people laughing at me than booing me.

Josh Peck

#25. Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt.

John Lahr

#26. Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

John Lahr

#27. Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.

John Lahr

#28. Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

John Lahr

#29. In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

John Lahr

#30. It's just a huge boost for us to have one extra playmaker on our defense. He makes so many impact plays and changes the game a lot.

Adrian Wilson

#31. A cruel critic has never made anything; his glibness is a way of inflicting his emptiness on others.

John Lahr

#32. Writers don't always know what they mean - that's why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the reader meets the authoritative, perfected self; in life, the writer is lumbered with the uncertain, imperfect one.

John Lahr

#33. Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.

John Lahr

#34. One of the major principles is that Soviet literature must be inseverably linked with the policy of the Communist party

Nikita Khrushchev

#35. I go to the theatre expecting to have a good time. I want each play and performance to take me somewhere. Naturally, this doesn't always happen.

John Lahr

#36. Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

John Lahr

#37. Broadway shows in New York draw two times the attendance of all New York sports teams put together.

John Lahr

#38. We live in a time of terror, and contrary to what we see on television and allow ourselves to believe, the real goal of terror is not to kill people but to kill thought; to so demoralize a society that it implodes from within.

John Lahr

#39. Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look.

John Lahr

#40. 'Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.'

John Lahr

#41. Although the 'New York Times' annually declares that Broadway is on its deathbed, news of its demise is greatly exaggerated. There's a lot of life yet in the old tart.

John Lahr

#42. Solya may not be wicked, but he likes to be too clever for everyone's good.

Naomi Novik