Quotes About Theatre

#1. I love musical theatre because I love doing a live performance eight times a week.

Gareth Gates

#2. I have lots of ambitions. I'd love to do theatre. I'd like to be in 'Tea With Mussolini 2;' I'd like to touch Meryl Streep - which would involve being with her in some exotic location. I have lots of fantastical dreams.

Miranda Hart

#3. There was a prison uprising at Alcatraz, and I drove the Marines over there in a landing craft to quell the riot. I am the only serviceman I know with an American Theatre ribbon.

Bud Grant

#4. What's exciting about theatre is observing human behaviour. You're constantly making judgments about body language, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual.

Hattie Morahan

#5. I come from theatre and I always go back every couple of years.

Ciaran Hinds

#6. I can get dressed earlier in the evening with every intention of going to a dance at midnight, but somehow after the theatre the thing to do seems to be either to go to bed or sit around somewhere. It doesn't seem possible that somewhere people can be expecting you at an hour like that.

Robert Benchley

#7. At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.

Edward Bond

#8. The Theatre of the Absurd is a theatrical embodiment and manifestation of existentialism. It is part reality and part nightmare

Martin Esslin

#9. The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It's a soothing falsity.

David Mamet

#10. It being a remarkable fact in theatrical history, but one long since established beyond dispute, that it is a hopeless endeavor to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.

Charles Dickens

#11. I did an A Level in Theatre Studies and had a really inspirational teacher, and then I just went on to university.

Jessica Raine

#12. I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone.

Maggie Smith

#13. You don't get paid a whole lot for theatre, but you know, I feel more like, 'Where could I buy this experience, and how much would it cost? Who else would give me this kind of focus and put me in a room with this kind of talent?'

Dennis Christopher

#14. It doesn't make sense, it's not logical, it's not a safe profession or a smart profession if you wanna make money or have a living or have a family. So the fact that we keep doing [theatre] means we're getting something from it that is almost childlike in its innocence.

Santino Fontana

#15. 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

#16. My second husband encouraged me to go to a writing group at our local theatre. It was my 'coming out of the closet' moment.

Sue Townsend

#17. My introduction to acting was through theatre, so I actually saw a couple of Broadway shows that made me want to be an actor.

Skylar Astin

#18. A young Brit girl with no theatre experience decided to take on an iconic American role on Broadway. Maybe I should have thought that through?

Emilia Clarke

#19. I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

Peter Brook

#20. I grew up doing theatre and spent a long time as a playwright. I still think very visually when I write.

Libba Bray

#21. There's such a work ethic involved in theatre that you can't learn in L.A.

Amy Adams

#22. What I want to give in the theatre is beauty, that's what I want to give.

Edith Evans

#23. At the end of the 1960s, I was part of the downtown theatrical movement in New York that was making work in alleyways, garages, gyms, churches, non-traditional spaces. The idea was to get away from the illusion of the conventional theatre. But then I thought, what's wrong with illusion?

Robert Wilson

#24. They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl's heart.

W.B.Yeats

#25. I came to Mozambique in 1986, when I first became involved with Teatro Avenida - a theatre company that stages plays concerned with political and social issues.

Henning Mankell

#26. I am a father, and sometimes I want to stay close to home. By varying the workplace, it gives me space to breathe. I enjoy theatre because it reminds me I'm mortal, and it's terrifying when it goes wrong but the most thrilling experience when it flies.

Colin Salmon

#27. The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.

Andy Goldsworthy

#28. I think the great thing about theatre, and if you start in theatre, is that it does build a confidence in poetic themes and ideas.

Abi Morgan

#29. I take great pride in recalling that I could open in a play on Broadway or in London's West End and fill a theatre on the strength of my name - Steed's name.

Patrick Macnee

#30. 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

#31. Firstly I did it in this huge theatre in Avignon, then to smaller places, then bigger places. You have to change the volume of the voice, give more or less. The way you have to relate to space makes it like sculpture.

Isabelle Huppert

#32. I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

Simon McBurney

#33. Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.

Pete Townshend

#34. Scottish Theatre's greatest success story of recent times.

Alan Chadwick

#35. In the theatre the stage keeps the audience aware of the fictional nature of the action. The reader poring over a magazine, on the other hand, identifies what he sees in the photographs as real.

Gisele Freund

#36. Opera is musical theatre, and the music can teach you so much about the theatre. Very often I use musical terms to think about how I comport myself on stage: I employ 'rubati,' 'ostinati,' 'cadenze.' Finding these parallels is very fascinating for me.

Toni Servillo

#37. Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.

Sam Shepard

#38. The logistic requirements for a large, elaborate mission to Mars are no greater that those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theatre of war.

Wernher Von Braun

#39. Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

Mark Rylance

#40. Don't expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them.

Bertolt Brecht

#41. It is my view that there is no sensible military use for nuclear weapons, whether "strategic" weapons, "tactical" weapons, "theatre" weapons, weapons at sea or weapons in space ...

Noel Gayler

#42. Theatre, film and television are all modes of storytelling, and many of us are fortunate enough to move freely among them without feeling that we've 'left' or need to 'go back' to one or the other. In fact, if the theatre is to avoid a brain drain, this kind of fluidity is increasingly necessary.

Theresa Rebeck

#43. Ever since I was little it was programmed into me that London is where great theatre occurs and all the big shows you love start there.

Zach Braff

#44. When I started drama school, theatre was the main draw. I never had any movie star notions. Not that there were family ties to the theatre, either.

Anne-Marie Duff

#45. I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights.

Lusia Strus

#46. Individual and corporate support is vital to building on London's leadership in the arts, and I hope others will join me in wanting to build on the National's role at the heart of modern theatre and sustaining it long into the future.

Lloyd Dorfman

#47. I'll never forget my first words in the theatre. "Peanuts. Popcorn."

Henny Youngman

#48. I want to be able to follow the example of those extraordinary British actresses who move effortlessly from film to TV to theatre roles.

Cate Blanchett

#49. It's true: theatre has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I always liked everything about it. As a child, I used to get so excited about performing, I'd get the giggles.

Hattie Morahan

#50. Growing up in Los Angeles, I was incredibly fortunate to be taken to theatre by my parents to see everything at the Music Center, at UCLA and beyond. I just adored it.

Dori Berinstein

#51. I trained in the theatre and I love the theatre. I get such a thrill seeing anything in the theatre.

Ewan McGregor

#52. Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

G.K. Chesterton

#53. There isn't really a theatre culture in L.A., which is odd when there are so many brilliant actors there.

Raza Jaffrey

#54. I think you can be terribly overexposed. I've been always very careful in my career to do theatre; it takes you out of the television eye, and people are glad to see you back again.

Denholm Elliott

#55. The Shakespearean theatre was the product of the entrepreneurial maritime culture of the age,

Boris Johnson

#56. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subject to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees, the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors.

Alexander Hamilton

#57. There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, they've forgotten that, and they leave going, 'Wow - what an amazing play.'

Kevin Spacey

#58. I don't even think places like the National Youth Theatre (NYT) are necessarily about wanting to be an actor when you grow up. They're about meeting people from different backgrounds and different religions and different cultures, and mixing with people that you wouldn't ordinarily meet.

Ashley Jensen

#59. You get pigeonholed. Some people are film stars, and some are theatre stars who do one-off telly. Somehow, I get into long-running series.

Kevin Whately

#60. You can only do so much theatre.

Victor Garber

#61. What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story.

Pete Townshend

#62. If you look at the muscularity of something like 'Wicked' and the way it has just spawned sort of generations of young people wanting to get involved in the theatre - it's brilliant.

John Logan

#63. I can't remember a single year of my life when I haven't made a piece of theatre.

Simon McBurney

#64. In the theatre, if you say 'Macbeth', all the actors will start looking very anxious. I'm so well-trained not to say it in the theatre that I can hardly say it in normal life.

Anna Chancellor

#65. We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes.

Ismail Kadare

#66. Chess and theatre often lead to madness.

Fernando Arrabal

#67. The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.

Jean Giraudoux

#68. I would most like to do film or TV. Possibly theatre in the future, but I'm in L.A. a lot of the time at the moment and if I was going to do theatre it would be in London.

Freddie Stroma

#69. Theatre has so many competitors, it's no longer enough to see and hear a play. You want to be able to touch and smell it, too.

Lucien Bourjeily

#70. A video taped stage performance is just - you know, it's never gonna be the same as it is if you're sitting there live in the theatre.

Nathan Lane

#71. But I loved the theatre and I was just doing theatre 24/7 and kept dropping courses because I didn't have the time and the chancellor thought that wasn't a good idea after awhile.

Mandy Patinkin

#72. I just wanted to be one of those actors who works at the National Theatre the whole time.

Robert Emms

#73. I'd love to do a musical one day - a theatre musical.

Spike Jonze

#74. Theatre is about the collective imagination ... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.

Simon McBurney

#75. My advice to young actors is probably to do some theatre; definitely do that. I keep running into these actors who have never been on stage, and it's invaluable for an actor. What you will learn about yourself is huge.

Yul Vazquez

#76. I think I've had an interesting life. I've done films, TV, theatre and got married. I don't have any regrets.

Kabir Bedi

#77. I am musical and I enjoy theatre, but I never wanted to just do theatre. I always wanted to go into film. I love film. I loved growing up in the theatre, but I always wanted to do film all along. But, I still pursue music separately.

Sabrina Lloyd

#78. As far as I'm concerned, Cate Blanchett is a goddess, but she's really down to earth. She's got all those Oscars, she's made all those amazing films and she could spend her whole life doing that, but what does she also do? She gives birth to three boys and creates her own theatre in Sydney.

Sylvester McCoy

#79. His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. 'Tragedy excites the soul,' he later told one of his secretaries, 'lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.'24

Andrew Roberts

#80. I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there's a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre.

Susan Hill

#81. I love the instant gratification of theatre - it reminds me of why I enjoy filming in the first place.

Steffan Rhodri

#82. I don't like the theatre. I like plays in which the audience is addressed by the actors. I don't like seeing people talking to each other on stage as if there isn't an audience.

Jonathan Meades

#83. I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it.

Richard Eyre

#84. I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.

Ajay Naidu

#85. I grew up doing musical theatre in Orlando, Florida. When I was 14, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time - a deliveryman heard me singing and offered to deliver my demo tape to Sony Music. I was just really lucky.

Mandy Moore

#86. I've been told if you're an actress you can't sing, if you're a dancer you can't act, you can't do theatre and be respected if you've done a TV soap, you can't have a No. 1 record. All these different things they've told me I can't do, but I wanted to do them, so I've done them.

Martine McCutcheon

#87. In theatre, there's the director, the writer, and below them the actor. In film, it's the actors who are most important. That goes against the grain for me.

Anne-Marie Duff

#88. You couldn't even write me a paper about the roles you would dream of playing in modern musical theatre.

Elaine Paige

#89. I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel.

Lou Doillon

#90. The (extremely lavish set) was created by a transparency, a fine gauze, finely painted. According to the theatre accounts, it cost 241 ducats, 91 ducats more than Rossini was paid for the music.

Richard Osborne

#91. My parents were always involved in community theatre, and I'd do the tech work and play the child.

Mark Linn-Baker

#92. That's why I love theatre, because things happen in the moment. I think you work without being conscious that you're working.

Clotilde Hesme

#93. I was really, really, really enthusiastic as a kid. I was up for anything. I was hugely into music and theatre. I was a big musical theatre kid; I loved reading.

Amanda Marshall

#94. I find the theatre faintly embarrassing for the actors performing on stage. It seems rather showy-off in an undignified way.

Charles Saatchi

#95. I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having.

Kiefer Sutherland

#96. To maintain one's individuality, integrity, and true personality in the theatre is a big task.

Cyril Cusack

#97. In theatre, you've got to make the connect with your audience in the first three minutes. If you haven't, you know you've almost lost them.

Om Puri

#98. I was never the class clown or anything like that. When I was growing up and doing theatre in Seattle I was always doing very dramatic work. Now I can't get a dramatic role to save my life!

Anna Faris

#99. I'm not sure I can name a kind of story that wouldn't work in comics form. It's words and images, and we've been telling all kinds of stories with that combination since theatre was invented thousands of years ago.

James Vance

#100. Where I came from, people couldn't afford to go to the theatre.

Tracy Morgan