Stage Director Quotes

#1. The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

Joseph Weizenbaum

#2. In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.

August Wilson

#3. My attitude as an actor, because I'm a stage actor, is whatever the director tells you to do, you try it. You don't resist what a director is giving you.

Anthony Heald

#4. You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Joseph Joubert

#5. People fantasize about being a hero and helping someone in trouble. Batman is that fantasy realized - not just for Bruce Wayne, but for the audience.

Kevin Conroy

#6. The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.

Lara Santoro

#7. You scoundrel, you have wronged me," hissed the philosopher, "May you live forever!

Ambrose Bierce

#8. I'm not experienced enough, or certain enough of my acting on the screen to say to a director, "You are wrong, I am right. I will only do it this way." I could never feel that, I wish I could be absolutely certain. But on the stage, it's different. I know where I am on the stage.

Ian McKellen

#9. My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible.

Emilia Clarke

#10. With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.

Martin McDonagh

#11. Smoking must be harder than not smoking. For the latter does not require any action.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#12. The fun for me is knowing what the other person is saying and what my character would be thinking at that time. On the stage you get the chance to do all that, to analyze and build a part, to react, to contribute something no one else can-not the author, not even the director.

Barry Nelson

#13. On the stage, you alone hold the key, and on the night you have to trust that the director has inspired you enough to take the material and run with it.

Greta Scacchi

#14. An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.

Immanuel Kant

#15. Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

Terry Teachout

#16. If all the world's a stage and all the people players, who in bloody hell hired the director?

Charles L. Grant

#17. When I drove up on the set one day, and they'd put up a sign that says 'The Bill Engvall Show,' I stood there for 20 minutes just staring at it. The director, James Widdoes, came up and said, 'What are you doing?' And I said, 'Look at this! There's my name on a stage door in Hollywood!'

Bill Engvall

#18. Would you do your job and not be paid for it? I would do this job, and take on a second job just to make ends meet if nobody paid me. That's how you know you are doing the right thing.

Oprah Winfrey

#19. On stage I am the actor, director and the bouncer all at the same time. Fear does not exist in this dojo does it? No Sensi! Sorry when I get excited I have to toss in some Karate Kid quotes.

Dane Cook

#20. No one appears on our stage unless the director has placed them there for our benefit

Paramahansa Yogananda

#21. When you're on stage with an audience, the director's nowhere to be seen. He's onto the next job.

Ian McKellen

#22. I was able to go from stage hand to floor manager to assistant director to director in a year because there was just no one else to do it and what I didn't realise and what people don't understand now about television is that we used to do about five shows a day.

Richard Lester

#23. If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.

Brad Dourif

#24. I do so love how all magic comes with its share of dire warnings and unclear requirements," sighed Tybalt. "It's like being on the stage, only there's no director, and the understudies have all died of typhus.

Seanan McGuire

#25. God's noblest work. Man who found it out? Man.

Mark Twain

#26. A director recommended me for the role on 'Soap.' They said, 'She plays heavy roles, murderesses and the like.' He said, 'On stage, she could be very very funny.'

Katherine Helmond

#27. If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your 21 y/o self? Answer: Think about your actions. They have consequences.

Claire Contreras

#28. I figured I had seconds, maybe minutes to live.

Curtis Sliwa

#29. If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.

Michael Caine

#30. Film is mostly a visual medium, and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance. For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, 'Out you go,' and the actors are in charge of that stage every night.

David Lindsay-Abaire

#31. I play the guitar. This year at the Sundance film festival, I joined the band from 'The Guitar' on stage. We warmed up for Patti Smith, and then the director Michel Gondry got on the drums to play some songs from the soundtrack to his film Be Kind Rewind with Mos Def. It was pretty mad.

Saffron Burrows

#32. You pray and nothing happens. You pray and nothing happens.
You pray and nothing happens.
You pray; - and something is bound to happen!.

Kunle Olusegun-Emmanuel

#33. A choreographer deals with the movement that you create, and with a creative director it's about the story, the stage, the lighting, the costuming, executing someone's idea, choosing how far to go or how little to go, and blending it so that you feel it, you're emotionally effected.

Laurieann Gibson

#34. On stage, the audience watches from a fixed viewpoint and the director cannot retake something he doesn't like. It has to work straight through.

Bruce Beresford

#35. I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there.

Kim Cattrall

#36. You are a dancer in this great stage we call life. Your imagination is the writer and thoughts are the director of the dance drama. So unleash your thoughts to dramatize your dance.

Debasish Mridha

#37. The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage.

August Wilson

#38. There's something mystical and wonderful about being in the room with the actual live performer s on stage that works. In film, it doesn't work so you're dependent on a great director to keep the thing moving along.

Marshall Brickman

#39. I have a pathetic urge at some stage in my life to be able to pull out my wallet and pull out a little card on which it would say, 'Kenneth Branagh, artistic director.'

Kenneth Branagh

#40. The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.

Patti LuPone