Quotes About The Theater

#1. Theater isn't there to provide answers. Only possibilities. I just ask the questions. But I believe hope comes from the fact that there is a potential for redemption. At the core, that's what matters in the theater I'm attracted to. Do we dare to hope? Do we allow ourselves to hope?

Joe Mantello

#2. I only worked theater jobs, but they were all really silly when I first graduated. I was a line monitor at 'Spamalot,' which means I got there at 8 A.M. and told people how much the tickets were for standing room. I was an NYU Medical School fake patient, to teach doctors how to talk to patients.

Lauren Worsham

#3. I did a play I think my first six months on the show, called Bullpen. Then I got involved with Theater Forty and did this play called Plastic which is about two male models coming to a casting call.

Austin Peck

#4. Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

Anne Rice

#5. 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

#6. The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.

Will Rogers

#7. The fight they had outside the Roseland Theater in front of a bunch of punks and hipsters.

Gayle Forman

#8. Coming from the theater, I love the adrenalin rush from working on 'NCIS.' You get home and you're exhausted, but you feel like you've really worked.

Cote De Pablo

#9. The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.

Saul Williams

#10. You create this situation where you are so dependent on each other. That's especially true for film. In theater, the actor has much more say, much more control, for better or worse.

Susan Sarandon

#11. Because of the power of television, I was visible to everybody all over the world. But there are many things in the theater that are more fulfilling and that I look forward to doing more. But really, I love it all: theater, film, television.

Charlotte Rae

#12. It took me years to actually get comfortable on the stage. I prefer the intimacy of screen; it comes easier to me. In theater, you have to be louder and bigger - that was harder for many years in my teens. But now I've conquered that. I eat up the stage. I love it.

Aileen Quinn

#13. No, the horror genre is not my first love. I don't run to the theater to see horror films.

Amanda Righetti

#14. I moved to New York to work in theater, so my range of motion was really from where I lived - which was downtown, in the Lower East Side - to Midtown, where the theaters are. So I got to know New York, Midtown and south.

Stark Sands

#15. I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

Martin Scorsese

#16. Ever since I arrived in America to promote "Stoker," I haven't had time to go and see it in a theater. The fact that I had to shoot twice as fast as I'm used to in Korea was the most challenging thing about my Hollywood experience.

Park Chan-wook

#17. I come from the theater, so for me rehearsal is vital and a way of life. There are many film directors who don't believe in it and some actors who prefer not to rehearse.

Hugh Jackman

#18. So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

Trevor Nunn

#19. So: this is where we are going to become parents. You walk into the building as a couple, and leave a few minutes later as a family. You walk in recollecting long romantic dinners, nights at the theater, and care-free vacations. You leave worrying about where to get diapers, milk, and Cheerios.

Scott Simon

#20. Always continue to perform no matter what or where the activity is: local theater, regional theater, local clubs or coffee shops. Continue to play the guitar or your instrument and always continue to progress or otherwise you will fail.

Tony Vincent

#21. If the theater is the refuge of the conversationalist whose friend is mute and whose mistress is insipid, then conversation, even the most exquisite, is the pleasure of men without imagination.

Marcel Proust

#22. And I think in theater, people don't really focus on the media unless there's a huge superstar doing a play or something.

Elizabeth Olsen

#23. I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.

Meredith Monk

#24. I left the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin in 2004, and I did five years of theater after that.

Aidan Turner

#25. 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

#26. Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

Israel Horovitz

#27. The theater is a kind of international language, and I like it. But I have a practical bent of mind, too. In any other field, I could make only about a tenth as much as I do acting. That's why I want to be a producer. It pays better, and you have more control.

Carolyn Jones

#28. I think theater will always be my first love. I've been doing it since I was nine, and there's nothing quite like being on stage, having the immediate intake of energy and exchange of ideas.

Tracie Thoms

#29. And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.

Elizabeth Olsen

#30. The theater is the thing I love doing most.

Judi Dench

#31. I didn't know what the path was that I wanted to be as an actor, to be honest. I've been doing a lot of theater since I was a kid, so I was just sort of taking opportunities.

Guy Pearce

#32. It was from Dionysus, the wine god, that the theater came.

Anne Rice

#33. All the world's a stage," is a metaphor comparing the whole world to a theater stage.

Stephen Davis

#34. Everybody has a public life, and they have their own private life. Everybody has their secrets. Everybody has their own private, you know, agonies as well as joys. And that's what great drama, whether it's the movies or the theater, that's what it shows.

Annette Bening

#35. For theater, the fashion had to have a certain grandeur that would read on the stage while also flattering the actress. The same thing applies when doing a wedding dress, but the treatments can be more delicate and there can be much more detail.

Austin Scarlett

#36. The world is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery.

Mary Oliver

#37. The terrible thing about acting in the theater is that you have to do it at night.

Katharine Hepburn

#38. I love the theater of the mind because you can go anywhere. You can say anything, and you pull people in. [You] can be jumping out of a window or riding a cow or having bubble-wrap sex or spraying your body with Pam and sliding out of your chair.

Harland Williams

#39. I had to drop a boulder to wake people up about the A.R.T. We've done that, and now we have audiences again who want cutting-edge work, who want to be challenged, but who also won't be falling asleep at the theater.

Diane Paulus

#40. I would say I've actually done a lot more comedy than I've done drama. It's weird the way that worked out, because when I came out of theater school I took myself way too seriously, so it's kind of ironic that I ended up sort of going down the comedy path.

James Roday

#41. I never want to pigeonhole myself or get typecast. I'm looking forward to my career and showing all of my range as an actress, and I'm looking at other mediums, too. I'm a theater actress first. And I cannot wait to return to the stage.

Samira Wiley

#42. I guess I've been training in the theater for as long as I can remember.

Kevin Spacey

#43. The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.

A.R. Rahman

#44. I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.

James Gray

#45. My limited theater experience was when I was a kid starting out: two or three plays. I was good in one and mediocre in the other. My problem is that I have other interests.

Michael Keaton

#46. I started in the theater when I was 10, so I grew up in the theater and was very used to that, but I love movies and television, also, obviously.

Morgan Fairchild

#47. The weary guests are asked to leave the warmth of the all-night theater, having slept on pictures others only dream on.

Tony Banks

#48. Actors and writers need to come back to the theater because it's a place where you can learn. You have to pay your dues, and people who haven't paid their dues in the theater, I think, have a hard time creating a whole career.

Joanne Woodward

#49. Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed.

Moses Mendelssohn

#50. The first perk of theater is the girls.

James Spader

#51. Idealistic producing is safe. Sensibly projected in the theater, the fine thing always does pay and always will.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#52. Theater was always in the backdrop. Nursing was a way to pay the bills. I wasn't a nurse; I had a nursing agency.

Lee Daniels

#53. I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.

Dana Carvey

#54. In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

Tom Stoppard

#55. This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

Carl Jung

#56. I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself - not me, but black people - that were uncomfortable.

Sidney Poitier

#57. I'm lucky to have worked in theater all over the world, but there's something magical about Broadway. The audiences are smart, they're educated. They go in ready and they're up for it, they're up for the party. It's a whole different atmosphere.

Hugh Jackman

#58. 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

#59. The funny thing is, because I was doing a lot of theater when I was a kid, and a lot of that was musical theater, as I got older I became more interested in acting as a separate entity and music as a separate entity, like songwriting and production and recording and playing music.

Guy Pearce

#60. My wife, aside from being amazing in general, was really the catalyst in this, and I really owe a lot of the move to New York to her. She reminded me I've always wanted to do move to New York for theater and said, 'Let's stop talking about it and do it.'

Josh Cooke

#61. The theater is who I am - it's where I feel the most inspired, the most at home, the most useful.

Mary-Louise Parker

#62. Will the theater disappear? No. Is it healthy? Also no.

Emanuel Azenberg

#63. Surely you don't consider me so inflated with the theater as not even to know that for anyone in his right mind a sensible few are more terrifying than a foolish many.

Plato

#64. I started as an actor, then became a theater director. I loved acting but didn't feel as confident as I needed to be, so I started directing theater; then I played in some movies, and then I felt the need to do my own stuff.

Baltasar Kormakur

#65. Being a part of the theater community has been important to me from the time I was a child, through my parents.

Lily Rabe

#66. All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.

Edna Ferber

#67. I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.

Christian Louboutin

#68. I grew up in a town with no movie theater. TV was my only link to the outside world. Film wasn't such a big deal to me. It was TV. So much so, that when I meet TV stars now ... Not my co-workers, but real TV stars, I get nervous. I freak out around them.

DJ Qualls

#69. My dad was very religious growing up and a little bit closed minded, and I think me being in the theater, two of my three sisters are dancers, so being in the arts world has changed and opened him up in a lot of ways.

Frankie J. Alvarez

#70. 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

#71. The first thing I ever did was play talent shows at the Uptown Theater and the Adelphi Ballroom.

Daryl Hall

#72. Theater is perhaps one of the few places left where we are in a dialogue right now. Everything has become so partisan, and the rhetoric has become so heated, that conversation is almost impossible.

Paula Vogel

#73. There was no theater program or anything where I'm from. So junior year in high school I started the theater program.

Jeffrey Donovan

#74. In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.

Stephen Sondheim

#75. Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

Arthur Miller

#76. I've been on the board of UCLA Film and TV School, and I went to UCLA. I realized that the same movie theater that was there when I went to school, 30 years later is the same movie theater in the same condition. There was an opportunity to refurbish an existing room, and I jumped at the opportunity.

Darren Star

#77. I was chomping at the bit to get my career started - so after I took all the theater courses at Brooklyn College I enrolled in a two year program at AMDA in the city (The American Musical Dramatic Academy) I was there for 6 months and loved it.

Didi Conn

#78. My mother had been an actress and we came from that world in New York, the theater world and the downtown sort of theater scene, and so I guess we didn't really have what you'd call like a Hollywood kind of life at all.

Martha Plimpton

#79. I have little routines in the theater. Once I've established something, like the order of putting on makeup and a costume, I have to invariably do it in the same order every time, even if I only did it by chance the first time round.

Ian McKellen

#80. The plays should have the half-life of plutonium.

Suzan-Lori Parks

#81. I started in theater, and I love to go back to theater, just to have the experience and recharge my batteries, creatively.

Zachary Levi

#82. 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

#83. I had one of the best days of my life. I spent the afternoon with my two kids and my ex-wife at Serendipity. Then I came to the theater, and you know, I think I did the play the best I've ever done it.

Gabriel Byrne

#84. The theater commitment is hard, especially in conjunction with a television commitment. That's a big, long commitment.

Sarah Paulson

#85. I was just on Broadway for four months, and the amount of fan mail that arrived at the theater was just overwhelming. I mean, I had no idea! I guess people suddenly had access to me and knew where to find me, so they got me there, and I was amazed.

Sonya Walger

#86. I always thought I would be a marine biologist because I love the sea - but considering the fact that I've always loved acting and the theater, I don't think I ever gave anything else much of a chance.

Renee O'Connor

#87. In Australia, there aren't a lot of people committed to art, so these communities form that are dedicated to music, theater, cinema, but they're very small. So, they tend to move ahead on the power of collaboration, enthusiasm and creativity.

Joel Edgerton

#88. When you walk into a movie theater, you don't walk out half-way through, and then come back the next day to watch the rest of it.

J. Michael Straczynski

#89. I auditioned equally for film and theater. The difference is that theater has seasons, while film, it's always happening.

Elizabeth Olsen

#90. In the restaurant business, as opposed to the theater, center orchestra is an 8 P. M. reservation. Orchestra on the side is 7 or 8:30. Mezzanine is 6 and 9. But people don't take it personally when they call the theater and can't get what they want.

Danny Meyer

#91. I was an 80's/90's baby so you went to the movie theater every weekend and there was one on, whether it was Stallone, Van Damme, Seagal or Schwarzenegger himself.

Channing Tatum

#92. You do need an outlet to release all of those fears. You build it up and then, when you go to a movie theater, it's the last place that it's socially acceptable to be terrified. It's saying that, for the next 90 minutes, you're allowed to be afraid and you're not a coward for feeling that way.

Eli Roth

#93. I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter ... '

Gary Oldman

#94. I have a complicated relationship with the horror genre. I love it; I loved it as a kid growing up, and I watched Chiller Theater in New York. So I loved it, but then you do feel if you do it too much, you're stuck there.

Zach Galligan

#95. I believe in the theater; I believe in it as the first glamorizer of thought. It restores dramatic dynamics and their relations to life size.

Laurence Olivier

#96. Once I discovered the theater at Santa Clara and once I got into the theater program, I never got into specific criminal justice studies.

Michael Trucco

#97. I did not see myself as a leading lady. I thought I was really funny-looking and I would never be the lead, and I certainly would never do film or television. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to be the grand dame of the American stage.

Kathy Baker

#98. I like the theater, dining and chasing women. Let me put it this way: I am a single, straight billionaire in Manhattan. It's like a wet dream.

Michael Bloomberg

#99. People love to be told stories, but it's the sugar that draws you into the theater.

Craig Bierko

#100. Sin in the theater, I can observe now, is comparable to education in a university: it is there for those who wish to take advantage of it, but fewer do than you might suspect.

Billie Burke