Top 100 Quotes About The Theater
#1. 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
#2. I was trained as a neurologist, and then I went into the theater, and if you're brought up to think of yourself as a biological scientist of some sort, pretty well everything else seems frivolous by comparison.
Jonathan Miller
#3. I'm a consumer as well as a performer. Among my leisure-time activities is going to the theater. I'm very interested in that.
Kathleen Battle
#4. The movies are not my first priority - the theater is.
Kevin Spacey
#5. I had such extraordinary breaks from the moment I entered the theater.
Dorothy McGuire
#6. The thing I learned from 'Pride and Glory' is that people like to feel a little better leaving the theater than they did coming in.
Gavin O'Connor
#7. God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world.
A. Alfred Taubman
#8. I had met a young lady who wanted to be in the theater. It was Judy Holliday. She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today.
Adolph Green
#9. The theater is so disappointing, really, that it's hard to go again and again. It's just too heartbreaking. I'd rather watch football or play a game or read.
John Malkovich
#10. All I know is that as an audience member, I am less and less inclined to go to the theater.
Shane Carruth
#11. When you play arenas you can create whatever you want. At a theater the height of the stage and the limitations of the theater can make you feel more separate from the audience.
Sade Adu
#12. The home of Rugby Union is in Twickenham - just outside London in the suburbs, where I live. I'm mad for it. The trouble with being an actor and being in the theater is that you always miss the games.
Alexander Hanson
#13. And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.
Viola Davis
#14. Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.
Al Lopez
#15. Sometimes I have a great day of filming and sometimes the theater strikes me better. It just depends.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#16. I started as an actor in the theater playing a lot of character parts, and suddenly, I found myself in this place where it felt like I was getting locked into a kind of a stereotype, and it did bother me.
Robert Redford
#17. People talk about generating my own work, but I don't really know how to go about that. There are certainly some roles in the theater I'd like to play but I don't know if I'll ever get to do it.
Julianne Moore
#18. The hard thing is getting people to come to the theater to see something, no matter if it's good or not.
Paul Feig
#19. We'll meet at the theater tonight. I'll hold your seat 'til you get there. Once you get there; you're on your own.
Groucho Marx
#20. I've always enjoyed performing. I was in figure skating before, and then I joined my first school play. Ever since that, you have not been able to get me out of the theater.
Daniela Bobadilla
#21. 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
#23. I think you can lose yourself more easily in a film than in the theater.
Pauline Collins
#24. I actually cried during 'Titanic'. It was one of the few movies I've seen in the theater multiple times.
Jason Earles
#25. Before we had the kids, my husband and I were traveling a lot and working and really enjoying our lives and each other. We both love the theater and books and travel and so we were really having a lot of fun.
Patricia Heaton
#26. In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
Arthur Miller
#27. I guess you get pigeon-holed in Hollywood, but I'm ok with that because I've been able to do a lot. I started in the theater, then I went to stand-up comedy, and then when I went into the movies to do comedy and drama and big movies and small movies.
Denis Leary
#28. There are times in my 30 years in the theater that I have come perilously close to losing faith in the one form of action I have in this life.
Athol Fugard
#29. What's a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You go to the theater, you're just so excited to see anything - the moment the lights go down is often the best part.
J.J. Abrams
#30. There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.
Tony Kushner
#31. Women are the essential part of the theater but the writers are not writing about women. I think they're too perplexed about the whole female situation probably.
Bette Davis
#32. In the theater we're like blue-collar workers: It's a physical job, you don't make a lot of money, and you're on the road all the time. It's worth it in that it's the best job in the world, but you have to negotiate living in cities that don't always accommodate you.
Randy Harrison
#33. If I didn't have kids, I would be at the theater or the ballet every single night of my life.
Sarah Jessica Parker
#34. I had given up the theater and everything propelled me into entertainment. And I didn't resist it.
Vincente Minnelli
#35. The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
Gore Vidal
#36. We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
James Thurber
#37. You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.
Jon Favreau
#38. Full Frame is where I had the first showing of my first film, 'Street Fight.' I have a fond memory of pacing around outside the theater, nervously trying to keep from throwing up. It's a magical festival, well curated, with a warm and generous spirit.
Marshall Curry
#39. I don't know anyone who's going to see Grind 22 times in the theater. My mom. Some kid who has short-term memory loss and forgot that he's seen it.
Adam Brody
#40. The theater, for me, has always been a place where I'm free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.
Ethan Hawke
#41. 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
#42. Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story.
("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
#43. In the theater you create a moment, but in that moment, there is a touch, a twinkle of eternity. And not just eternity, but community ... That connection is a sense of life for me.
Edward Teller
#44. Having that college-town atmosphere with a live repertory company available was a real gift. I found myself gravitating toward the theater from about the age of nine. I guess it was the environment that got me started.
Christopher Reeve
#45. People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.
Minnie Maddern Fiske
#46. 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
#47. I don't see the theater as an establishment. The National Theatre has always seemed to me a people's theater. It was never meant to reinforce the values of the government of the day, nor does it, nor should it.
David Hare
#48. It's one of the functions of the theater to shock and titillate and appall, apart from entertain and delight.
Jacki Weaver
#49. In the theater, it's a visceral and physical response because you move around so much. You have to do something physical to pull you in. On TV or in movies, everything is so small. You can just lock into a character and ease yourself into that way.
LaTanya Richardson
#50. What happens in Israel, it's not so divided between being a film actor, or a TV actor - usually, we just do everything. I do theater, film, and television, and the theater is mostly financed by the government.
Meital Dohan
#51. There are two kinds of directors in the theater. Those who think they are God and those who are certain of it.
Rhetta Hughes
#52. 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
#53. I love the experience of walking into the theater, buying a ticket and all that goes with it.
Victoria Mahoney
#54. I like the theater enormously, but I truly love films - the whole bizarre, boring process that it can be.
Minnie Driver
#55. The theater has often been at variance with the pulpit; they ought not to quarrel. How much is it to be wished that in both the celebration of nature and of God were intrusted to none but men of noble minds.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#56. I see only defects because I'm not following the scene as it were. I'm not following the other person. It's like the best thing to clarify this is the theater.
Omar Sharif
#57. I have gone to many theaters where it is so unpleasant with the commercials before the movie, the volume, and the disrespect of the filmgoers. So I understand people not wanting to go to the theater.
Jeff Garlin
#58. I did 'Love's Labour's Lost' in the theater and found it to be riotously funny.
Kenneth Branagh
#60. As an actor in the theater you're taught that you never play a bad guy. You have to love who you are. You can't say, "Oh, I'm a bad guy." How do you play that?
Denzel Washington
#61. Before I ever acted as an amateur - which I did a great deal at school and at university - I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up ... Theater of all sorts.
Ian McKellen
#62. I've always had not just an affection but a real love for the theater family in New York, and I really feel it is a family. I'm so touched by the generosity of everyone there.
Lindsay Duncan
#63. I cannot tell you that I ever fell in love with the theater as an audience. I fell in love with the theater as an actor for a period of time, but I have struggled as an audience, and I struggle more now than then. I was always a movie guy.
Sean Penn
#64. Tim Robbins had real confidence in college. He literally stole actors from the theater department at UCLA to be in his plays. The department heads got so mad at him.
Daphne Zuniga
#65. Radio is truly the theater of the mind. The listener constructs the sets, colors them from his own palette, and sculpts and costumes the characters who perform in them.
Mercedes McCambridge
#66. I go to the theater, all the time. I'm not one of these secret movie, watch a 35mm print in my living the weekend it comes out guys. I'm not Jon Bon Jovi. I go to the Arclight, like a regular asshole.
Seth Rogen
#67. Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.
John Lithgow
#68. The theater was empty: nobody had come. Sometimes these things happen, and nobody can say why.
From ""Amandina".
Sergio Ruzzier
#69. When I was younger, I would see shea butter being sold on the street, and I was interested how people were still coating themselves in the theater of Africanism. You see that in dashikis and hairstyles and music.
Rashid Johnson
#70. The theater should be free to the people just as the Public Library is free, just as the museum is free ... I want the theater to be made accessible to the people.
Eva Le Gallienne
#71. I was just blown away by everything my dad was doing, every play. It was amazing to be able to go as a young person to the theater and see these visuals and how creative it could be. More than anything it was realizing you could do that as a life path.
Jorma Taccone
#72. In the sixth row of the theater, in the third chair in, Anna winks at me. Or maybe she just blinks. I can't tell. She's missing half of her face.
Kendare Blake
#73. You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.
Adolph Green
#74. One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you've been aiming at all your life - shocking it, pleasing it - has suddenly left the theater.
Katharine Whitehorn
#75. There was laughter in the back of the theater, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.
George S. Kaufman
#76. There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are - at their best - an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.
John Ridley
#77. I love movies. That's still my favorite form of escape, and I usually end up going alone. I love to go and sit in the theater by myself, no distractions.
Douglas Booth
#78. When I was doing theater, I was very successful at believing that I was great, God's gift to the theater.
Morgan Freeman
#79. It's not that I'm sick of the theater, don't get me wrong. I'm just tired of the commitment.
Richard Griffiths
#80. Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.
Jeremy Piven
#81. Sir Larry could be very strict and a disciplinarian, too. He had many faces; he wore many hats. But, ultimately, he loved the theater and he loved actors.
Derek Jacobi
#82. Making music, dancing, the theater, conversation, proper and urbane deportment, these were cultivated here as particular arts. It was not the military, nor the political, nor the commercial, that was predominant in the life of the individual and of the masses.
Stefan Zweig
#83. Be reflective ... and stay away from the theater as much as you can. Stay out of the theatrical world, out of its petty interests, its inbreeding tendencies, its stifling atmosphere, its corroding influence. Once become
Minnie Maddern Fiske
#84. In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.
Orson Welles
#85. In the theater, when people hear that you're writing a play, they want to know what it's all about, whether there's a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you're really ready to have company.
Marsha Norman
#86. Some days, I just love the physical space of the theater. I love theaters; they are heartbreakingly beautiful to me.
Peter Hermann
#87. I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater. And I've been able to wed the two passions.
George Takei
#88. Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.
Eli Wallach
#89. If you came into the theater believing in the talking snake, it's kind of hard to leave the theater still believing in the talking snake.
Bill Maher
#90. I'm very aware that when one is acting in the theater, you do become kind of animal about it. And you're reliant on instincts rather than tact a lot of the time.
Alan Rickman
#91. It has been my experience that work on the screen clarifies stage portrayals and vice versa. You learn to make your face express more in making movies, and in working for the theater you have a sense of greater freedom.
Fredric March
#92. For me, it's all I've wanted to do. I did local plays and productions, local theater groups and anything that involved it. And then, I went and studied it, attended drama school and got my first lucky break in the theater in London, and just went from there.
Colin Morgan
#94. I have been to the theater more since I have lived in New York than I ever really did in London working on a television show.
Richard C. Armitage
#95. 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
#96. I think the moment I discovered I definitely wanted to act was when I saw a play alone by myself when I was fourteen. Maybe it was a Moliere play? I discovered the atmosphere of the theater, and I knew I wanted to be an actor.
Louis Garrel
#97. It doesn't matter to me if I'm in love with my performance, so I watch all of my performances to understand and learn from them and figure out what's working and what's not. And I see the movies that I'm in in the theater a lot.
T. J. Miller
#98. I used to do a lot of fencing in the theater and a lot of horse riding in the early days, so I'm used to it in a way. If you're classically trained like I am, it's a little bit like mother's milk to me. I enjoy it.
Brian Cox
#99. The theater kids? My God, it would be a bloody massacre. They would be found beaten to death with their own dog-eared The Wiz songbooks.
Jesse Andrews
