Quotes About Theater And Life

#1. Dance was always part of my life because I was a dancer and my mother was a dancer, and I love the theater.

Amy Sherman-Palladino

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you're going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he's obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.

Timothy Dalton

#5. 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

#6. The best night of my life was watching the Japanese Noh theater. I've only seen it once, but even saying it now, I think, 'How can I ever have this experience again?' It was so mesmerizing, so complicated and so primordial; I could not believe it.

Vivienne Westwood

#7. 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

#8. I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that.

Harold Prince

#9. People who are left alone tell the story but are never a part of it; those who are a part of the crowd, are story bound, acting upon the role assigned to them in the theater of living, loving and longing.

Aporva Kala

#10. One life per year. It seemed so moderate a price ... until you looked back and realized you could fill a movie theater with your victims.

Kelley Armstrong

#11. I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#12. When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.

Andy Serkis

#13. The real stakes in the theater are high - they are life stakes. That's what I love about it. You gamble with your life, and that's a gamble worth taking.

Lauren Bacall

#14. 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

#15. I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.

David Byrne

#16. I love London because of the history. The times I've been there have been some of the best memories in my life. Singing there, seeing great theater - and the people like a Southern accent.

Kristin Chenoweth

#17. I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

William Shakespeare

#18. Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York.

Ira Sachs

#19. I liked being in a smaller theater. I love doing shows of all sizes, but sometimes it's nice to be in a smaller space and to strip away some of the music so that you can be a little less than larger-than-life; you can be a little more naturalistic.

Max Von Essen

#20. There's life time and then there's theater time. On time in the theater means fifteen minutes early.
Oh. So they're all early in life time but just on time in theater time. Got it.

Suzanne M. Trauth

#21. The universe is not for man alone, but is a theater of evolution for all living beings. Live and let live is its guiding principle. 'Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah' - Non-injury is the highest religion.

Virchand Gandhi

#22. Take the leap. If you love theater more than anything, take the leap. It's so rich if you give over fully to it; there are no halfers or returnsies in this business - if you don't ... There's no way to go other than full tilt with your life and job.

Michael Lomenda

#23. The first seven years of my life, me, my mom and dad and my four older siblings lived in a suburb of Stockholm, and my mom was very active with directing theater. So I basically grew up at the theater on the floors of the shows, so I was really surrounded with music at a young age.

Erik Hassle

#24. We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.

Antonin Artaud

#25. I worked in theater my whole life. My mom was a drama teacher at my middle school. In high school, I was Drama Club President every year, and then I auditioned for conservatory acting programs.

Jenn Proske

#26. I'm not sure that I want my life to consist of Hollywood franchises, to be honest. There are other types of work that I'm interested in, like theater and just more serious drama and I just don't know.

Taron Egerton

#27. All life is theatre,' he said. 'We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves ...

Susan Cooper

#28. There was no theater in my high school. I think even our art program was cut - it was so bad. I didn't even know that was a possibility in college or in high school; I hadn't even thought of it. It was pretty negligent. My father has run a bulldozer all of his life, and my mom is in real estate.

Boyd Holbrook

#29. I lost 100 pounds and embraced theater and music as what I was going to make for the rest of my life.

Josh Young

#30. Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.

Brooks Atkinson

#31. We're passionate musicians, but we felt classical concerts were more like a funeral because nobody talked and everybody was dressed so conservatively. We thought that's kind of strange, because music is full of life! We thought we could break through that barrier with theater and comedy elements.

Aleksey Igudesman

#32. The theater I got to do informs every move I make as an actor and will for the rest of my life. I can't shake it if I wanted to, but I don't want to.

Jim Parsons

#33. I love the theater community and theater life, and would love to figure out the distinctive differences between Broadway and the West End.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#34. Real life, the real world, is a vast theater of salvation, directed by our wise and totally involved God.

Eugene H. Peterson

#35. You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.

Cyrus The Great

#36. I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.

W.S. Gilbert

#37. The audience that storms the box-office of the theater to gain entrance to a sensational show is small and sleepy compared with the throng that crashes the courthouse door when something concerning real life and death is to be laid bare to the public.

Clarence Darrow

#38. One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.

George Jean Nathan

#39. I had spent time in New York, where I loved the idea that theater could be done up in tiny little rooms rather than for lots of money on a big stage, and be tied to ordinary life.

Garry Hynes

#40. If I could act in theater, my whole life, and never act in film or television again, and just direct the rest of my life, I would gladly do that.

Matthew Lillard

#41. I've always loved film, and since I knew I probably couldn't be a cowboy or a spy in real life, I thought I'd play one in a movie! I started doing theater in middle school and tested for 'Victorious' before being in an episode of 'iCarly.'

Spencer Boldman

#42. Whether it be current or past, every single song that I recorded is about me. It's a peek into my life, past and present. Maybe it's coming from my theater and performance background, but nothing felt right unless I could relate to it.

Lea Michele

#43. Although I'm perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that - feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social interaction, like theater and games.

Jane McGonigal

#44. I don't know where my career is going to lead me. I would like my career to be as diverse as possible. I've done theater and I've done music, and I would love to keep that in my life.

Graham Phillips

#45. 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

#46. You really, really, really have to love what you are going to do in theater because it is an unmerciful life. It's six days a week. It's eight performances a week. And that's doing the exact same thing over and over and over again.

Harvey Fierstein

#47. All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

Sean O'Casey

#48. My whole background, my whole life was just lots and lots of theater, a lot of that being musical theater.

Zachary Levi

#49. And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the summer and I hear the bees buzzing and for a moment I truly am Alice in Wonderland, do you have the heart to tell me I am not?

John Logan

#50. Some of the young kids look for one hit to be a star; that what they're known for the rest of their life ... I never wanted to be known as one thing; that is the reason I do classical theater, write, direct and the blessings God has given me ... I want to share.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson

#51. Since I was 19, I've had the most fun possible every single day, even when I had a rough life. It was the army which taught me about life, and the theater which taught me how good it could be.

Michael Caine

#52. Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything that is good in me.

Charlotte Bronte

#53. Theater is a space where you cross over from everyday life, because there are real people in that moment moving in front of you - you're being invited to believe in a story and cross that bridge.

Cate Blanchett

#54. I did an internship in the Silicon Valley during the Internet boom. I couldn't imagine sitting in a cubicle the rest of my life, so I gave acting a try. I would have been happy doing theater and making nothing.

Justin Chon

#55. Pinchas Perry, the director of 'The Chicago 8,' offered me the role of the judge, and he did not know that, 35 years earlier, I'd played a judge in the theater production. So life has its own little twists and turns.

Philip Baker Hall

#56. It was a weird moment in my life and a weird experience [doing a theater]. It made me think, "Gee, I don't know if I ever want to do this again." And I love theater. I love going. I love the experience of theater. But I am not sure it's for me.

Jodie Foster

#57. The theater let me dramatize inner struggles, the push-pull between the inner life and the world, the various selves I presented according to what each world required. And it let me use my body.

Margo Jefferson

#58. The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

Antonin Artaud

#59. I was probably singing before I could talk. Musical theater is my passion. If I could afford it, I would just do dinner theater and live a simple life.

Bethany Joy Lenz

#60. A new star has been born and Vera's performance brings alive the desolate life of O'Neil's young heroine in a natural talent that is so fresh and yet so ageless.

Rajiv Kapoor

#61. I came from Texas, I was studying theater at NYU, and I thought for sure that my lot in life would be to get the best bartending job I could find and do theater in New York. And that was a good life.

James Roday

#62. Having grown up in a racist culture where 2 and 2 are not 5, I have found life to be incredibly theatrical and theater to be profoundly lifeless.

Beah Richards

#63. If I was discovered by anyone, it would be Stephen O'Neil, who saw me in a play at Williamstown and introduced me to my team who I'm still with today. He was the first person to introduce me to the film and TV world. Other than that, I just assumed I would be a theater actor my whole life.

Logan Marshall-Green

#64. I've sung my whole life. I did a lot of musical theater growing up, I sing in the shower, sing in the car, sing everywhere really, on set at Chuck, all the time. I like it, and I've always felt like I've had a knack for it, or a talent for it, on some level, I don't know.

Zachary Levi

#65. I love theater. I love the idea that you can transform, become somebody else, and look at life with a completely new perspective. I love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen.

Natasha Tsakos

#66. The theater has fallen into the hands of real estate men and syndicates and those who have no love or interest in the stage or its life, but who have considered it principally as a means to make money.

Eva Le Gallienne

#67. From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.

Alexander Koch

#68. There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater.

Charlie Kaufman

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. All I've done is live my life in the theater and loved it.

Marian Seldes

#77. Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.

David Byrne

#78. Let's just say I can never be cast again after Ron Swanson. Then I have a life of theater and woodworking and my wife to look forward to, and that doesn't make me anything but very happy.

Nick Offerman

#79. Performing in a live theater is absolutely unbeatable. It is something I have done my entire life and have a gift, it seems, for sharing thoughts live.

Val Kilmer

#80. Theater is the best. That's where you get the work done. You just really get in there and figure something out about a story or a character or life or the world. That's where magic stuff happens.

Michael Shannon

#81. I am inspired by great food, theater, books, the beach, black-and-white photography, and great vocalists, like Dianne Reeves, Alice Smith, and Shirley Horn. I am inspired by my mentor Diana Castle, who is guiding me towards a truth and honesty in my life and work that I have always longed for.

Erica Tazel

#82. I had done a lot of plays, particularly at my own theater in LA, and it was the first time in my theatrical life where I didn't feel that my role was also to keep everybody else working hard.

Gregory Harrison

#83. When I doing dinner theater in high school, I was talking to a woman who had been in the business for a while and I said I want to act, that's all I want to do with my life and she said if you're serious then you need to hone every discipline you can.

Blair Underwood

#84. One thing I'm a big fan of is the theater of the absurd. That's what I come from, that's what I love to do more than anything. What I love about absurdity is the words "comedy" and "drama" get thrown out the window and it's just life, which is absurd.

Michael Shannon

#85. Democracy is not theater - it determines life and death!

Mimi Kennedy

#86. After 30 years in the theater, I'm used to having a great amount of control over what I do. But with '24', you place your character's life in the writers' hands, and you have no idea what's going to happen until you're sent the next pages.

Cherry Jones

#87. I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater.

Luchino Visconti

#88. I'm satisfied. I am progressively making my life and my name in the surest and purest manner. If I catch on in the theater, as I think I will, all the doors will gladly open wide for me.

Federico Garcia Lorca

#89. My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.

Robert Wilson

#90. Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic.

Jennifer Stone

#91. I really had spent my whole life playing soccer, and the fact that I was willing to give that up for theater, that told me I was moving in that direction.

Peter Jacobson

#92. You never get anywhere until you figure out the difference between passion and compassion.

Cynthia Heimel

#93. I went to NYU Tisch for undergrad, and it was amazing. My life then was extremely experimental with acting. I did crazy theater where we would be rolling around on the floor. I would be playing grandmothers, and clowns, and all this crazy stuff. Then I would be doing Shakespeare eight hours a day.

Katie Lowes

#94. You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck.

Rick Moody

#95. In '75, the year both A Chorus Line and Chicago hit Broadway, my head spun around and I became the ultimate theater queen for life.

Michael Musto

#96. Depression is something that seems really obscure when you see it in a theater, but when you talk to people who come to see it and hear their reactions, you realize that it is such a prevalent part of life and our society today that it really needed to be told, and still needs to be told.

Aaron Tveit

#97. I do think that it's better for a musical to live its life first because if you see it on the screen, would you like to go to the theater after that? Probably not. You've seen it. And that's the mystery of a musical that hasn't been filmed. You're bloody meant to go there and buy your ticket.

Bjorn Ulvaeus

#98. Since babyhood, I've always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church causes.

Judith Jamison

#99. I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.

Audra McDonald

#100. I wanted to be an actor because I wanted to be onstage. I wanted to do musical theater, and from that I realized I was interested in plays. I never imagined myself on television. I was so lucky to be onstage my whole life.

Jesse Tyler Ferguson