Quotes About Theatre

#1. Performing on stage is my first love - it's why I wanted to be an actor in the first place - and 'Arcadia' is the highlight of my career so far. I love the intimacy of a live theatre audience - you can really squeeze every last drop out of each scene.

Tom Riley

#2. I've always loved and enjoyed the theatre, but I have to say that none of our sponsorships have been done because I'm one of those chairmen and chief executives who goes gooey-eyed about something. They are done for a very specific marketing and commercial agenda.

Lloyd Dorfman

#3. The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.

Will Rogers

#4. I saw 'Clueless' five times in the theatre when I was growing up.

Lizzy Caplan

#5. Honestly, I really don't like acting. I don't enjoy it. What I do like is going to a movie theatre and seeing my face on a poster. I like seeing my name on a poster. That is cool.

Gabriel Iglesias

#6. I do still like television very much, but the theatre does really have something special about it.

Sarah Sutton

#7. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.

Rene Descartes

#8. My unworldliness, even at 21, was abnormal. Not only had I never smoked tobacco nor touched alcohol of any description, but I had never yet set foot inside a theatre, or gone to a race course I had never seen, nor held a billiard cue, nor touched a card.

Algernon Blackwood

#9. Every book should begin with attractive endpapers. Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins.

Cornelia Funke

#10. I want everyone to feel as much as possible as if they inhabit the same space. They more fluid the relationship between actor and audience, the better.

Christine Jones

#11. I enjoy theatre tremendously, and there's nothing like a live performance.

Melanie Rawn

#12. Hollywood is a very interesting place to deal with. And having been a theatre person, I was quite surprised by the slipperiness of some people in Holly-weird. There was a part of me that just said, 'If this is the way the game is played, I'm not sure I want to play it.'

Joyce DeWitt

#13. I like going to New York. I like the galleries and the theatre and the restaurants and bars and music. I think that city is more alive than Los Angeles.

Sara Gilbert

#14. Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff didn't like the word 'horror'. They, like I, went for the French description: 'the theatre of the fantastique'.

Christopher Lee

#15. Theatre is liberating because it only works if it's truthful - that's what it requires. That's not true of film: the camera does lie.

Helen McCrory

#16. People in America, they're getting dumber, they're getting less able to analyze something and think critically, and pick apart the underlying elements. And more and more ready to make a snap judgment regarding something at face value, which is too bad.

William Missouri Downs

#17. I get on with actors, and when I'm doing a theatre show, it's great being with them all the time. But we're all alike, and it's much nicer being with people who are different.

Phil Daniels

#18. I was never a joiner. I tried - I had people I admired and liked and wanted to hang with, but I ended up starting a theatre company and that took me back to Chicago ... I guess I wasn't a scenester in the end. Something must have worked out right, as I'm still here - but I'm only a binge socialite.

John Cusack

#19. I often make the analogy with tennis. Every match the rules are the same, but no game is ever the same. Theatre is like that. Every time is different.

Kevin Spacey

#20. Every character is a part of you and a part of the character that you are going to evolve into that you are not yet.

Angelina Jolie

#21. My biggest ambition when I was younger was to appear on stage at what was then Nimrod, which is the theatre where my father used to take me on Sunday afternoons to see matinees. The most extraordinary things used to occur on that stage.

David Wenham

#22. I think it is so much more fun to discover film in the movie theatre when there is so much anticipation about the movie.

Anne Hathaway

#23. I have a large personal collection of pictures. For every project, I choose images. Usually I don't do this until I've done an extensive script breakdown and distilled the text down to poetic form. I have to plant enough seeds so that there will be vibration.

Christine Jones

#24. I used to love stage above all, but that was when I was a single man. As I get older, the time commitment gets harder for theatre.

Seamus Dever

#25. Musical theatre is something that I always wanted to be a part of, and my first ever role on the West End as Joseph in 'Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat' gave me a taste for it.

Gareth Gates

#26. I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.

Dagmara Dominczyk

#27. I am a huge theatre geek.

Sarah Rafferty

#28. The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Oscar Wilde

#29. I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) ... I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.

Noel Coward

#30. The theatre is not the place for the musician. When the curtain is up the music interrupts the actor, and when it is down the music interrupts the audience.

Sir Arthur Sullivan

#31. I've always loved musical theatre. I've always been a big kind of closeted musical theatre nerd. I really have always dreamed about being able to do musical theatre.

John Gallagher Jr.

#32. Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.

Patrick Marber

#33. Amy Rapp, my producing partner, and I are drawn to character-driven material. We're developing and producing movies and TV, fiction and non-fiction, studio and independent, broadcast and cable, theatre, and web so our slate is really diverse.

Meredith Vieira

#34. Artistic ambition is important. And it seems it would be a great time to do some theatre, like a new extreme.

Emile Hirsch

#35. I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.

Antony Sher

#36. Even to an outsider like myself, not only in the theatre was such disunity evident, but in much else in government Spain. Alvarez del Vayo, Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, once asked, Why is it Spain's people are so great, but her leaders so small?

Langston Hughes

#37. 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

#38. In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.

Juliet Rylance

#39. I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.

Isadora Duncan

#40. The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.

Alan Bennett

#41. I find that actors who are wanting to pursue tv or films don't seem to have much interest in classical theatre.

Renee O'Connor

#42. I did my New York debut at 21. It was 'On the Town' at the George Gershwin Theatre. New York is my artistic home.

Jesse Tyler Ferguson

#43. His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.
- ,

Anais Nin

#44. I never imagined I'd go into acting, but I always loved drama, and when I was 16, I discovered the Library Theatre up the road. So I plucked up courage and asked if I could watch rehearsals. It was like Heaven.

Lesley Nicol

#45. The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

Voltaire

#46. People who have never done theatre before, and have only worked in front of a camera, would find it very difficult, I think, to know how to command a stage and work with the logistics of being on stage. They're very different. The theatre is quite tricky, actually.

David Wenham

#47. One of the things I find very difficult about theatre is the repetition - that something can slide away from your original intentions.

Ben Whishaw

#48. There are some sights that, once seen, can never be unseen. They replay themselves on a loop in your mind's home-theatre system with Dolby surround sound until you're so desperate to be rid of them that you'll resort to other loops simply to dislodge them for a while.

Kevin Hearne

#49. The theatre and traveling through my modeling jobs, all of those experiences have helped a lot actually.

Alexis Bledel

#50. I'd auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and I didn't get a place and it was terrifying.

Matthew Macfadyen

#51. Theatre is live content, and you can tell if you have worked your audience.

Om Puri

#52. She understood about the comfort you can get from a small separate world, whether it's a theatre or a basketball team or the inside of a book.

Susan Cooper

#53. The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.

Anne Michaels

#54. You know that feeling when everyone around you is happy and you feel like you're standing back to watch them from afar? Like you're in this crappy little theatre all by yourself, watching the lives of other people who are totally fabulous? Yeah, that's me.

Jen Naumann

#55. I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level.

Simon McBurney

#56. At college, I felt frustrated thinking three years was a long time and I just wanted a job but afterwards I was in employment the whole time. I got into a theatre company and started doing stand-up gigs for cash, so I lived hand-to-mouth, but there was always enough to pay the bills.

Bill Bailey

#57. You learn an incredible amount doing theatre, not just about to behave.

Michelle Dockery

#58. What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin.

Katharine Hepburn

#59. A creative and artistic home is what I've been looking for in the theatre.

Kenneth Branagh

#60. We are a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk.We are the original displaced personalities, concentrated gatherings of neurotics, egomaniacs, emotional misfits and precocious children.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#61. If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.

William Shakespeare

#62. Had I not done Shakespeare, Pinter, Moliere and things such as 'Godspell' - I played Judas in a hugely successful production before I did 'Elm Street' - I'd probably be on a psychiatrist's couch saying: 'Freddy ruined me.' But I'd already done 13 movies and years of non-stop theatre.

Robert Englund

#63. Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.

Jean Douchet

#64. I know what it's like to have a young child at the weekend and feel like there is nothing to see in the movie theatre. Family is so important.

Teri Hatcher

#65. I recall the night that President McKinley died. I was working at the time at a theatre in St. Louis. The oppressive feeling was in the air. I could not make the people laugh.

Al Jolson

#66. Even if the play is great, every day in theatre you have to question everything because the audience is new every day. I love that.

Clotilde Hesme

#67. I tell my children to avoid theatre and go into cinema and TV.

Peter O'Toole

#68. In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.

Peter Brook

#69. There's all that brain work involved, remembering all those lines in a script. I find I have to eat a lot of fish, late - but not too late - in the afternoon. Doing theatre, you need to be like an athlete in training.

Jerry Hall

#70. What you find in the theatre is that if you're good, no matter what color you are, the audience will buy that - whoever you are.

James Avery

#71. The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.

Marina Abramovic

#72. Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history; it describes the theatre of events.

Jean Fernel

#73. I've always tried to not let movie, television or theatre be all that my life is about. I've always tried to get involved in the community or my family now I have kids.

David Morse

#74. I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.

Eugene Ionesco

#75. In this country, you have movie actors and theatre actors and television actors.

Max Von Sydow

#76. It's a whole different kind of anxiety. But the great thing about doing a theatre job is that once the ball starts rolling you just have to go with it, it's inexorable.

Emily Watson

#77. I've had plenty of lessons about film acting and theatre acting.

John Boyega

#78. I think as a filmmaker my first contribution would just be to make a good movie that people would love to see and leave the theatre charged, with a sense of excitement.

Michael Moore

#79. When I'm doing theatre, I feel like my life's on hold. Even though you might go out for a coffee, or go and see a film, your brain is still there, pulling you back to it.

Shirley Henderson

#80. Unlike his predecessors, Obama is not big on 'Masterpiece Theatre' nostalgia.

Tina Brown

#81. I'm an old-fashioned theatre major at heart.

Tom Lenk

#82. Telly and films has been my thing, not necessarily by choice, and if the right piece of theatre came along, I would jump at it.

Darren Boyd

#83. I still feel I belong to the theatre. There is nothing more challenging and exciting for an actor than performing before a live audience. The stage is the real testing ground for an actor.

Anupam Kher

#84. I was always very independent and looked out for myself. I think that ability really helped me in later years both in sports and in theatre.

Jack Wagner

#85. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them.

Jeff Brooks

#86. I'm grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored - I've done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare.

Sheridan Smith

#87. I didn't grow up a theatre kid, going to theatre camps. I played sports, and that was my main direction. But luckily, I never had to choose between sports and theatre.

Aaron Tveit

#88. The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.

Romain Rolland

#89. I love the instantaneous nature of filming rather than the repetition of working in the theatre, but that maybe because I haven't had great experiences working in the theatre.

Emilia Fox

#90. Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about."
"Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre.

Marisha Pessl

#91. By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!

Alfred Enoch

#92. I'm very driven, and I always have been. So I'd like to release a successful album, continue in musical theatre, and be more involved in business.

Gareth Gates

#93. I started in theatre, and for me, it was all about transformation. You transform into the character that you're playing.

Rainn Wilson

#94. I'm not real. I'm theatre

Lady Gaga

#95. I studied drama in high school, and when I was 18, I studied at the Actors Studio in New York. Then I moved to London when I got engaged to Bryan Ferry, and I studied at the National Theatre there.

Jerry Hall

#96. The idea of doing theatre always terrified me because I get terrible stage fright. In the early 1970s I was offered a panto but the thought of going on stage was just too mortifying.

Britt Ekland

#97. Actually, my favourite roles have been in theatre, but on TV, my faves were Slap Maxwell and Larry Sanders.

Megan Gallagher

#98. The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth - it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.

Willem Dafoe

#99. I've always said the theatre is my church. It's where I feel God the most. It's where I know there's a God.

Ruthie Henshall

#100. I started doing theatre, and that's when I really fell in love with the profession; I learned a lot. It felt a bit weird to go from living in New York on Broadway to university, so I kept putting it off. Then, eventually, I had to give up the place.

Bel Powley