Quotes About The Theatre

#1. Charity in the theatre usually begins and ends with people who have a play opening the week following one's own. Their unlikely benevolence is not so much a purity of heart as the knowledge that they face a firing line with rifles aimed in exactly the same direction.

Moss Hart

#2. My parents met in the theatre, and I thought that was so romantic. My dad was a scenic designer and my mom was a dancer, and that's how they met; they met in the theatre.

Skye McCole Bartusiak

#3. T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.

Banksy

#4. I pretty much have no life outside of the theatre. I go home every night, and I put the TV on, and I veg out and order food.

Idina Menzel

#5. What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don't get impatient in the theatre.

Stephen Sondheim

#6. Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

James A. Baldwin

#7. I grew up listening to music and going to the theatre.

Cate Blanchett

#8. I don't tend to get cast in the theatre much. People assume I come with all this baggage. But they do cast me in films. In films, I'm a nobody.

Simon McBurney

#9. In the theatre, as anyone knows who's even done amateur theatre all their lives, you immediately find a family there. Because you're under stress, you're trying to create something, you're putting on a show, you find brothers and sisters right away.

Saul Rubinek

#10. The cool thing is that, unlike film, the theatre roles for women get better and better as you get older.

Idina Menzel

#11. Every now and then I have to teach directing. The thing about the theatre is that the most important thing you can do as a director is to make sure that everybody is in the same world - you have to create the world and make sure everyone buys into it.

Stephen Daldry

#12. It is brilliant going to the theatre and being forced to sit and listen and think about life. It can be almost a near-religious experience.

Emily Mortimer

#13. The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

Edward Bond

#14. When I left the theatre and turned to writing, one of the big pulls was that, unlike the theatre, I didn't have to wait to be hired before I could do my art. That was huge. But you still have to figure out how to support your habit; it's rare and lucky when art pays the bills.

Debra Dean

#15. Mum wasn't at all religious, but she thought that going to the theatre was as important a ceremonial, communal experience that a person could have.

Hayley Atwell

#16. When you combine the men and women deployed from our military installations with activated reservists and members of the National Guard, Georgia is contributing more personnel to the theatre than any other State in our Union.

Sonny Perdue

#17. The voices of moral authority in the theatre demanded only punctuality and physical performance. In the light of continuing pressure and stress, the occasional lip service paid to moderation was meaningless. Starvation and poisoning were not excesses, but measures taken to stay within the norm.

Gelsey Kirkland

#18. We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema - some actors don't like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.

Boris Spassky

#19. I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

Arthur Miller

#20. With the theatre, your whole day is geared towards the evening's show, and that's the job. People usually go to work about 9 and come home around 5, or maybe 7.

Kristin Scott Thomas

#21. The theatre is one of those muscles - if you don't exercise it, it becomes a strange and truly fearful place.

Dawn French

#22. You can act truthfully or you can lie. You can reveal things about yourself or you can hide. Therefore, the audience recognizes something about themselves or they don't
You hope they don't leave the theatre thinking that was nice ... now where's the cab?'

Alan Rickman

#23. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and they weren't very happy at the idea of me choosing acting as a career. Everyone in my family went to university - my older brother is a lawyer - but when they saw me for the first time at the theatre, they thought, 'OK.' They like it very much now.

Caterina Murino

#24. The regrets in the theatre have always been the shows that you know ought to have worked but for one reason or another haven't.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

#25. As a child I was taken to the pantomime or the theatre and I would always, always fall in love with somebody on the stage. And want to have sex with them.

Ewan McGregor

#26. The Parisian has his amusements as regularly as his meals, the theatre, music, the dance, a walk in the Tuilleries, a refection in the cafe, to which ladies resort as commonly as the other sex. Perpetual business, perpetual labor, is a thing of which he seems to have no idea.

William Cullen Bryant

#27. I've gotten to go wonderful places, meet interesting and intelligent people, and I started of course in the theatre and continue to work in the theatre where there is some intelligence involved in it.

Jeffrey Jones

#28. I love the rehearsal process in the theatre, and the visceral sense of contact and communication with a live audience.

Judd Nelson

#29. In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.

George Jean Nathan

#30. The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.

Arthur Miller

#31. There's nowhere to hide in the theatre. You can't be the one in rehearsal who doesn't know their lines.

Keeley Hawes

#32. In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.

Simon McBurney

#33. The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!).

Augusto Boal

#34. I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over again.

Sarah Waters

#35. I think the theatre is as essential to civilization as safe, pure water.

Vanessa Redgrave

#36. One of my beliefs is that there are certain institutions within a community which stand for the spirit and heart of that community, there's the church, the local football team, the local pub and the theatre.

David Soul

#37. Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.

Terrence McNally

#38. I was born in the theatre. My father was a small time impresario on the West Coast and I was acting from the age of 7, but I started to write when I was 12 and by the time I was 14 I was making more money than I was acting.

Anita Loos

#39. It's very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.

Laura Wade

#40. Any play I do, anything I do in the theatre, it's absolutely essential for me in a sense, to create a family, to put a group of people together who love to share together what they're doing, rather than be individuals.

George Ogilvie

#41. I like working in theatre now and I think that once you've done a certain amount of films most actors love working in the theatre because of the camaraderie.

Francesca Annis

#42. Men go to the theatre to forget; women, to remember.

George Jean Nathan

#43. The theatre show-biz types don't change much, no matter what era we're in. The question of how you balance being in show business with your personal life isn't very different.

Scott Ellis

#44. A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

Alfred Hitchcock

#45. Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.

Mary Pickford

#46. I've played a lot of roles I haven't wanted to play, either because they needed someone in the theatre or because they couldn't do it without me 'cause they don't have anyone else the right age.

John Mahoney

#47. Unease is not an emotion I get often in the theatre, and I like it.

Tim Crouch

#48. I think film likes me better than the theatre does for some reason.

Miranda Otto

#49. Many in the audience consider leaving.
If anyone leaves, let them leave.
The theatre is not a prison.
If anyone coughs, cough also.
The Theatre is not a sickbed.
We minister to the audience.
We revere the pains of the audience.

Lem Doolittle

#50. When I began to direct, I began to understand and realise that everything that I'd learnt, both in music and dance and in the theatre, seemed to come together as a director, and I began to enjoy it. And slowly I let the acting go.

George Ogilvie

#51. What happens a lot in film, though not so much in the theatre, is that you get stroked and sort of massaged, like a little guinea pig.

Cate Blanchett

#52. Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

Elizabeth Bowen

#53. Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance.

Margaret Atwood

#54. The theatre is a machine of transformations: everything is transformed into another thing; a bald man has thick hair on his head; a man with strong legs gains a limp and a sharp-eyed person becomes blind; an actor who is an atheist immediately turns into the most pious priest on earth! ~

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#55. If your church is the theatre, New York means a lot - it's a pilgrimage you want to make.

Cush Jumbo

#56. The ending is really the most important part of the movie. If the first hour and 20 minutes is terrific and the last ten minutes stinks, everybody walks out of the theatre and says: 'That was a lousy movie!'

Larry Cohen

#57. Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That's New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then - the alley.

Ben Hecht

#58. Victoria had the discipline of being a queen to help her through the biggest trial of her life - when she lost Albert and faltered. I've had the discipline of the theatre to help me over the ups and downs. A wonderful life . Go it old girl. You've done it well.

Helen Hayes

#59. When you go into the theatre and the lights dim, you want to entertain people from beginning to end. You want them to be swept up in your story, on the edge of their seats, unable to wait to see what happens next, be blown away and afterwards just go, 'Wow!'

John Lasseter

#60. I remember going to the theatre when I was little and the lights going down and just getting really scared about what was going to happen up there.

Paul Dano

#61. This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.

Robertson Davies

#62. We don't want bores in the theatre. We don't want standardised acting, standard actors with standard-shaped legs. Acting needs everybody, cripples, dwarfs and people with noses so long. Give us something that is different.

Sybil Thorndike

#63. I like to hang out with my friends, go to the theatre, watch DVDs, read, play with my niece.

Michelle Ryan

#64. The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

Marcel Proust

#65. There's something wholesome about the theatre.

Ian McKellen

#66. The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.

Enid Bagnold

#67. Hollywood can be brutal, inhuman, the opposite of what the theatre is, and I had little desire to be part of it.

Joyce DeWitt

#68. I believe in the immortality of the Theatre, it is a most joyous place to hide, for all those who have secretly put their childhood in their pockets and run off and away with it, to play on to the end of their days.

Max Reinhardt

#69. I've always found it not only easy, but enjoyable. It's necessary for us to reach out and I'm speaking for myself here. I certainly have a sense of responsibility to reach out to these people in the theatre who might look to someone like me for some guidance.

Harvey Keitel

#70. When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.

Andrew O'Hagan

#71. My main ambitions, really, are in the theatre.

Romola Garai

#72. It was only in the theatre that I lived.

Oscar Wilde

#73. In the theatre, because you're all looking at the same thing in the same space, consciousness is no longer individual. There is a unified consciousness. Until you look and project what is happening, it doesn't exist; the audience are the ones making the theatre, not the players.

Simon McBurney

#74. I suppose because I do and can work in the theatre, I don't see work as closing down as an older woman.

Lindsay Duncan

#75. I would hate to think of the theatre world without critics. Without them, we'd not have the record of each season.

Marian Seldes

#76. The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.

Sarah Bernhardt

#77. In a world of iPads and emails, nothing has really changed in the theatre. You still get in an hour early, do your wardrobe, put an old pair of tights under your wig, and you have, 'This is your call, Miss Jensen'. I got exhilarated by that.

Ashley Jensen

#78. More young people need to come to the theatre in general.

Tobias Segal

#79. I met my wife Anne who was a sociology student, and her influence together with activities associated with the student movement of the time opened up my interests amongst other things into the theatre, art, music, politics and philosophy.

Paul Nurse

#80. I love the theatre and theatre people.

Cyril Cusack

#81. I remember seeing 'Hairspray' when I was 15, and it is such a luxury to be able to see a Broadway show, and it is so hard to do if you don't live in New York - plus, it can be expensive to go to the theatre all the time, too.

Nikki Blonsky

#82. The real thing is, you should be seeing these plays in the Theatre. That's what they were written for. That's where the enjoyment is. Studying them is no enjoyment whatsoever.

Tony Randall

#83. And people are so het up about the fact I'm in the theatre - it's like, 'Ooh these telly names, can they be any good?' I came out of RADA and my first job was at the National Theatre, but everyone wonders if I can cope. It makes me laugh.

Joanna Page

#84. I've done a lot of costume drama and theatre - the National Theatre and In fact, most of my work at the theatre, at the National Theatre anyway, was period.

Brenda Blethyn

#85. There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.

Sean Penn

#86. I was a football player at college and dislocated my thumb. I was out for a bit and passed the theatre and saw some lovely drama students walking into an audition for 'Much Ado About Nothing' and thought: 'That's what I'll do when I recover.' I joined that production and was hooked.

Clark Gregg

#87. Because Chicago was to radio what Hollywood was to films and Broadway was to the theatre: it was the hub of radio.

Mel Torme

#88. I would like to reconcile the church and the circus. I wanted to transform the theatre ... to get my message across that there is only one God - the living man - the person sitting next to you. That is my religion. I believe that there is a sense to life.

Oleg Kulik

#89. As a kid, the theatre always felt a bit like running away to join the circus.

Robert Sean Leonard

#90. My parents didn't take me to the theatre to see Chekhov when I was growing up - we went to see 'Francie and Josie' once every five years.

Peter Capaldi

#91. There's a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre.

Boman Irani

#92. I love England, the people, the parks, the theatre.

Woody Harrelson

#93. I'm trying to do the kind of projects that I want to see in the theatre.

Nicholas Lea

#94. I love the theatre. It's a perfect life for an actor: you can do a couple of movies and then go and do a play, and then go back and do another movie. It's a nice way to live your life.

Alfred Molina

#95. The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

Iris Murdoch

#96. Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.

Ben Kingsley

#97. The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

Stella Adler

#98. Acting is a sport. On stage you must be ready to move like a tennis player on his toes. Your concentration must be keen, your reflexes sharp; your body and mind are in top gear, the chase is on. Acting is energy. In the theatre people pay to see energy.

Clive Swift

#99. I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go - that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

Lady Gaga

#100. The truth of the matter is I stayed in L.A. raising my children, and when they went to college, I packed my bags along with them and came to New York and looked for parts in the theatre, because that's always what I preferred doing.

Andrea Martin