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. 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

#3. Sometimes we get stuck in patterns or reoccurring themes in our lives that require a shocking epiphany to give us the opportunity to see new possibilities and notice the obstacles that keep us from moving on.

Kat Lahr

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

John Lahr

#7. '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

#8. Life here on Earth is promised suffering and one needs to find ways to live through it. Many people turn to meditation and prayer - anything that can connect us deeper into ourselves and with the divine.

Kat Lahr

#9. It is logical to say that ignorance seems to be the root cause of all human suffering.

Kat Lahr

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

John Lahr

#11. We are all tied to the burdens of this existence, and it seems as if everyday renewal is occurring in our lives and those around us.

Kat Lahr

#12. After The Wizard Of Oz I was typecast as a lion, and there aren't all that many parts for lions.

Bert Lahr

#13. I don't know about you, but I believe that in our present time we are definitely shaking things up with human fate in this world.

Kat Lahr

#14. '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

#15. 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

#16. When it comes to society and human consciousness, Darwinism still exists in its primal message.

Kat Lahr

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

John Lahr

#18. 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

#19. Equality has a hard time in humanity. Race, sexuality, or creed has always divided societies.

Kat Lahr

#20. Our future paths are defined by how we turned and walked the road in the past.

Kat Lahr

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

John Lahr

#22. There seems to be a sense of balance or equilibrium that nature attempts to achieve with the usage of cycles, leading us to the concept of self-organization and spontaneous order.

Kat Lahr

#23. Criticism is a life without risk.

John Lahr

#24. 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

#25. There is something particularly special and personal about the circle and how its curves comfortably rule every aspect of our lives.

Kat Lahr

#26. Parts of our genome simply cannot survive a situation where the environment suffers from the full overload of toxins we currently live in.

Kat Lahr

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

John Lahr

#28. The case for interconnectedness between conscious human lives is hard to deny.

Kat Lahr

#29. It is within the boundaries of reflection we are able to become aware of insights that can lead us to understanding.

Kat Lahr

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

John Lahr

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

John Lahr

#34. That was my one big Hollywood hit, but, in a way, it hurt my picture career. After that, I was typecast as a lion, and there just weren't many parts for lions.

Bert Lahr

#35. 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

#36. Society needs to evolve just as our DNA does.

Kat Lahr

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

John Lahr

#38. 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

#39. Precedence exists in humanity as it does with law.

Kat Lahr

#40. We are living a life full of first experiences, from a first kiss, to the first time giving blood, to conceptual and philosophical explanations of humanity's firsts.

Kat Lahr

#41. t can be easily argued that all living things are conscious in some aspect, but many would agree that advanced consciousness like our own is unique.

Kat Lahr

#42. 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

#43. We must not fall asleep in the present because the now moment is the only reality we truly have.

Kat Lahr

#44. 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

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

John Lahr

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

John Lahr

#47. 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

#48. Humans have wandered the Earth for thousands of years but never has our capacity to alter the Earth's ecosystem at a larger scale been more prominent than it is today.

Kat Lahr

#49. 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