Top 100 Quotes About Theater
#1. The way I view comedy clubs is, people are drinking, they're ordering food, they're out for the night, and there's also a person onstage talking. And with the theater, they came to the theater, and they're waiting to hear what you say. So you'd better have something to say.
Mike Birbiglia
#2. I'll see you at the theater tonight. I'll hold your seat til you get there. After that you're on your own.
Bert Kalmar
#3. When I first got out of school, I went on a children's theater tour, and I went around the country a little bit that fall, and it was the first time I went to Chicago. We spend a couple of days in Chicago, and I was really struck viscerally by the city.
Allison Tolman
#4. When you call someone and ask them to do something they've never done before, in different mediums I think they would be inclined to pass because they're afraid of the risk. But the creative people who populate the theater world love the challenge of new things.
Neil Patrick Harris
#5. If you think there is anything in theater that objectively exists without your point of view attached, you are wrong.
Anna D. Shapiro
#6. Everything has combined to make my life in New York an amazing experience. I told my manager a few years ago that I wanted to move here and try acting in the theater.
Mariska Hargitay
#7. I had done theater during high school and college, but with my life and everything I had going on, I decided to go for the health field, where there were stable jobs.
Dascha Polanco
#8. Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, women - we're all trying to find our place in this world of cinema and television and theater. And the great thing with comedy is that most of the time, you could be orange. It doesn't matter, as long you're funny.
Sandra Bullock
#9. I learned about life before I went into the theater, which is why I've been so happy. I was a soldier.
Michael Caine
#10. I'm sort of one of those weird actors who whenever I do a play, I think, 'Oh, we should film this,' as opposed to have to belt it out of ourselves in a theater auditorium.
Clive Owen
#11. I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds.
Stephen Sondheim
#12. I'm a kid who did stock and summer youth theater where we'd put up two shows and you had no rehearsal. I've also understudied, where I've had to go on with no rehearsal.
Donna Murphy
#13. It was important for me as a theater artist to allow myself and my interests to evolve over time and allow my notion of what success meant to evolve over time. I've always had a day job and never been just acting. But it didn't make me feel like I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.
Allison Tolman
#14. In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.
Tallulah Bankhead
#15. What's great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.
Daniel Dae Kim
#16. Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We've never quite made peace with that in the theater---set designer Robin Wagner
Barbara Isenberg
#17. The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.
Virginia Postrel
#18. I am more alive in the theater than anywhere else, but what I take into the theater I get from the streets.
Al Pacino
#19. There's definitely a visual aspect and an emotional aspect to a song. And that harks back, for me, to theater.
David Cook
#20. I realize I'm a very lucky man. I love what I do, I love films, TV and theater, and the fact that I'm able to make a living at it staggers me.
Eric Stoltz
#21. The theater is where I belonged; I simply wanted to be an actress my whole life.
Loni Anderson
#22. After 'Peepshow,' I really don't know what my next project will be. But I would like to keep on doing theater. I think I could do that forever.
Coco Austin
#23. There's always something more to be accomplished with a character. Theater is a human experience. There's nothing shellacked or finished off about it. I guess that's why it always draws me back.
Sada Thompson
#24. I feel as though I would be delighted to come back into working in the film world, and working in the theater world again. I'm just gonna see what happens.
Karen Allen
#25. I've always found as an actress that the best thing to do in film or TV or theater is just to lose yourself in it. Think of the story, the character, the worlds we're in, and forget everything else.
Helen Mirren
#26. Parsi theater was known for melodrama.
Irrfan Khan
#27. Both have trouble working up the nerve to go into the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings.
Jenny Offill
#28. I wasn't sold on 3-D until it was in my own home. The images jump out at you, even more so than in the theater, because you're in tighter quarters and you're closer to the TV, so it feels like the depth is very dramatic.
Katie Leclerc
#29. I'm a New York girl. I come out of New York theater.
Joan Rivers
#30. Simplify, slow down, be kind. And don't forget to have art in your life - music, paintings, theater, dance, and sunsets.
Eric Carle
#31. I take my favorite and most promising lads to the theater," said [Sherlock] Holmes. "I'd say that if they were born into better circumstances many would have grown up to be MP's, but in truth most are too smart and too honest for Parliament.
Dan Simmons
#32. I was preparing myself for the theater, and ... I got a little job here and a job there, but it wasn't going well, and I considered some time before the mid-60s that maybe I should consider something else.
James Earl Jones
#33. Theater, because of the commitment, it has to be a great role and a great play to me. It takes a lot out of you.
Stephen Lang
#34. During the Second World War, nobody built any concert halls or theaters. After the war, Lincoln Center was a very brave project because all those architects had never built a theater before. We've learned a lot since then about the nature of materials and the isolation that's required.
Hugh Hardy
#35. I was raised in the theater and, as it turned out, a TV show was like performing a new one-act play. So, it was really no different.
Bea Arthur
#36. I don't any longer make any quality judgement between theater and cinema. They are different experiences for the audience, and they also are for the actors - although they have a lot in common.
Ian McKellen
#37. I was in theater when I was in elementary, middle school and high school. I didn't know it would be an actual profession for me. I didn't think of it as a reality.
Katie Cassidy
#38. I think it's so incredibly special to be able to try to recapitulate that feeling I had when I was sitting in that theater, as a 7-year-old. It's an extraordinary job. I'm incredibly lucky.
Chris Weitz
#39. I had no desire to be in the movies. All my training had been in the theater, thank God.
Jack Lemmon
#40. Out of nowhere, I became a fairly well-known director with a penchant for opera, which I did for 10 years. Then I realized I was taking myself out the theater channel, and so I re-focused on theater.
Jack O'Brien
#41. I couldn't remember my name for weeks. I'd be at the theater and hear them calling 'Miss Stanwyck, Miss Stanwyck,' and I'd think 'Where is that dame? Why doesn't she answer? By crickie, it's me!
Barbara Stanwyck
#42. I knew early on that I was a nerd and that films were my refuge. Those first few minutes before the lights went off, and you're alone in the theater waiting, were really pleasurable.
Alfonso Cuaron
#43. Nobody has yet proven that taking a chance and doing something unique that an audience isn't used to is a bad idea. What the theater lacks is that kind of courage.
Harold Prince
#44. I grew up in Houston, and I remember we had separate drinking fountains, and black people sat in the balcony of the theater ... We had an African-American housekeeper growing up who was really like my second mother. I thought it was silly - hatred just because of the color of somebody's skin.
Dennis Quaid
#45. I don't think that theater is the higher medium, that it's better than film.
Rebecca Hall
#46. Thank God for theater and film and television and my very, very, very lucky life.
Jonathan Banks
#47. Well, really the way worked was that I had probably built fifty robots before Mystery Science Theater, and I had sold them in a store in Minneapolis in a store called Props, which was kind of a high end gift shop.
Joel Hodgson
#48. I tell people all the time, I've always loved music and I love the language, which is a huge reason why I'm part of theater. But, I didn't wanna do all of this. I would've been satisfied to do it, like, on the weekends among friends, and to have a regular job.
Mos Def
#49. I never went to school for directing. I studied theater with a director. I followed plays to see how a director would talk to the actors. I tried to make my own school.
Denis Villeneuve
#50. Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
Camille Paglia
#51. As I've gotten older and I've watched people in productions, I go to the theater when I go back to London and see friends in Broadway, I think maybe there might come a time here to get back up there and prove oneself. It's just an itch; it's a nagging itch to go back there.
Pierce Brosnan
#52. I had to work out where I was going, what type of films I wanted to make. For that reason, I decided to choose independent productions, less important roles, and I tried theater, too.
Elizabeth Berkley
#53. Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.
Edward Albee
#54. When movies first came out, maybe they were in black and white and there wasn't any sound and people were saying the theater is still the place to be. But now movies and theater have found their own place in the world. They are each legitimate art forms.
Hans Zimmer
#55. I was a 'Glee' fan before I joined the show! Since my background is musical theater, it was exciting to see a TV show that incorporated music so much and in such a genius way.
Becca Tobin
#56. When I was focusing on theater, I would go on for months without any work and could hardly pay the rent.
Luke Evans
#57. I lived with Ilana Glazer of 'Broad City.' She was my roommate for a year and a half. I was living with her just as she was creating and filming 'Broad City.' Both of us, and a lot of my friends, come from the Upright Citizens Brigade theater either in New York or L.A.
Rachel Bloom
#58. I had a big part of my life in the theater in Philadelphia. Philadelphia's changed, but I love it.
John Glover
#59. We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.
Carly Simon
#60. If I hadn't gone into the theater, I would be a painter.
Joe Mantello
#61. Whether I'm directing live action or animation, my responsibility is the same. I have an audience sitting in a theater with their popcorn, and I've got to show them a good time and make them feel something.
Lee Unkrich
#62. I'm addicted to routine. I don't know if that's because I moved around so much as child - by the time I was 12 years old, I had lived in about 10 different places. But I like going to the theater at a certain time.
Sarah Paulson
#63. I don't find anything interesting about the choices a character faces in major films or theater projects. The characters are just cut-out dolls with the American flag sewn on them.
Amanda Plummer
#64. I might be doing a lot more theater, which is kind of what I love, but there's simply no time for.
Erika Slezak
#65. The tragedy of "Hamlet" is critically considered to be the masterpiece of dramatic poetry; and the tragedy of "Hamlet" is also, according to the testimony of every sort of manager, the play of all others which can invariably be depended on to fill a theater.
George Augustus Henry Sala
#66. In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you're good, but on the screen you can't really fool anyone for a second.
Gloria Swanson
#67. What I'd really like to do is do a film or two a year and then do theater in New York the rest of the year.
Piper Perabo
#68. I had a sympathetic role in 'thirtysomething,' and in two weeks I'm going to do the role again. But in the movies, I just love the heavies. It's much more fun. Villains are a ball. People have been laughing at me for 50 years, so I love to sit in the back of the theater and listen to them hate me.
Alan King
#69. Having an opportunity to play different characters, and work in different mediums, that's what's fun. The worst question you could be asked is, "What do you like better, film, television or theater?"
Corey Stoll
#70. You go where you think it's good for your work and your soul to go. I need to go someplace where I am reminded about why I wanted to act in the first place, and for me, that's the theater.
Patricia Richardson
#71. My happiest times in the theater are when I do ensemble pieces. I really got into theater because of that closeness.
Faith Prince
#72. Turn on the news and see how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single 'victim' of Columbine?
Morgan Freeman
#73. Good theater is not what is expected, but what surprises.
Mae West
#74. They say that theater is the actor's medium, television is the writer's medium and film is the director's medium, and it's really true.
Charlie Hunnam
#76. I'm really eager to go back and do some theater. I would love to do some more comedy as well because I think that's really the hardest thing to do; it's what I grew up doing, and I would love to go back and do that. I did a lot of theater growing up - musical theater.
Bridget Regan
#78. That's what I tell young actors. "You don't have to compromise. Go do some theater and wait for an appropriate role."
Denzel Washington
#79. Let's just say that the theater is not for the faint of heart.
Phylicia Rashad
#80. I wasn't a glamour-puss, and there were more interesting roles for an actress like me in the theater and in live television.
Nancy Marchand
#81. I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.
Ronald Reagan
#82. I studied physical therapy, and I started to study theater because my aunt is a theater director.
Miguel Angel Silvestre
#83. I was very fortunate that a teacher saw that I read a lot and got bored very easily and had a lot of energy, so she said, 'You've got to go to this youth theater.' I joined Manchester Youth Theatre when I was really young, and I just loved putting on and being involved in plays and telling stories.
Justin Chadwick
#84. I've actually seen a good amount of the shows at Lincoln Center Theater. I went to school right across the street at Juilliard, so some of the first stuff I got to see here in New York was at the Lincoln Center Theater. I've always been inspired by the work that they do.
Seth Numrich
#85. Going to the theater is such a joyous experience. My dad would take my sister and me to plays when we were very young, like six or seven years old.
Julia Roberts
#86. I love movies, and theater, and kayaking, reading, biking, walking - oh, and dancing. I love to dance!
Judy Blume
#87. I was a crazy guy in Hollywood back in the day, and then when I switched into theater, I got into work mode.
Scott Haze
#89. I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft.
David Ives
#90. The National Association of Theater Concessionaires reported that in 1986, 60% of all candy sold in movie theaters was sold to Roger Ebert.
David Letterman
#91. I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.
Deborah Eisenberg
#92. We all need to go to good theater; that is what I believe will save it.
Estelle Parsons
#93. In some movies you feel like you're a very small part of a huge machine. Whereas in the theater you can have a very small part, but you can still feel the weight and the gravity of it. Given the nature of theater, it's a more concentrated and quiet experience.
Minnie Driver
#94. My mom started working at the California Shakespeare Theater in Oakland when I was two years old, so I've always grown up around theater.
Zendaya
#96. In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#97. It's not enough for me to cover theater, I have to throw myself around every other art form, and do so thoroughly and relentlessly.
Michael Musto
#98. I saw the Stones three years ago at the Wiltern Theater in L.A. and that was mind blowing.
Joe Elliott
#99. One of my comics is read by more people - around 70,000 - than will see my entire run at Manhattan Theater Club. That puts things in perspective.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
#100. If I had to pick one form of acting, it would be live theater. That's where I started; that's where I became a man, I think I'm still finishing up that job.
Nick Offerman
