Top 100 The Play Quotes
#2. When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.
Edward Albee
#3. I don't know whether our watching the play in these times was a coincidence or divine intervention but time and again, we were introspecting.
Sushma Swaraj
#4. Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#5. A weakness of many of the self-oriented play theories is that they often sound too much like vain consumerism instead of being about the more passionate and willful character of human play, which involves a willingness, even if a fantasy, to believe in the play venture itself.
Brian Sutton-Smith
#6. I did a school play when I was 10 where I played a cold germ infecting a whole classroom of kids. The play was called 'Piffle It's Only a Sniffle.' I'd never had so much fun. It was a thrill.
Kim Cattrall
#7. When the sun sets beautifully, other beauties rise. Nature is a theatre; when one great player leaves the scene, another great player immediately enters. The play always continues excellently.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#8. The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
George Steiner
#9. If I "try" to play, I fail; if I force the play, I crush it; if I race, I trip. Any time I stiffen or brace myself against some error or problem, the very act of bracing would cause the problem to occur. The only road to strength is vulnerability.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#10. Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain's era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.
Timothy West
#11. The big turning point came when I played in the pit orchestra for a production of SWEENEY TODD and I spent most of the time watching the play instead of playing the score! And that's when I knew I had it bad for acting.
John Cariani
#12. You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
G.K. Chesterton
#13. A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
Kenneth Tynan
#14. I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
Cynthia Ozick
#15. There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#16. Because I have a passion for the play. My father was a chess teacher, and I learned the play of him as a small child. Occasionally I made another career; but now I have again the possibility of maintaining the passion of my early youth days.
Carmen Kass
#17. There's a method aspect to Campbell Scott character and he really wants to get into his character and he wants to cast to go on a fast so that by the time the play opens nobody's eaten in three days because he wants the audience to feel the pain from the stage.
Denis Leary
#18. The first act's doubtful, but we say, it is the last commends the play.
Robert Herrick
#19. Usually, the biggest problems of adapting plays into screenplays is that they stick too close to the play, and I think film is a completely different medium. I think a novel is much closer to a film ...
Arthur Miller
#20. In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.
T. S. Eliot
#21. Humans recite the words to the play they are in without ever bothering to read the script.
James Rozoff
#22. The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.
Al Pacino
#23. The play passed by quickly, and yet it seemed to George as though she had been onstage since the beginning of time, as if she were born there and had only now found herself where she had always been.
Alex Gino
#24. I loved them all equally, from the short story, to the poem, to the play, for nothing could touch me so deeply as a well-placed word.
Cheryl Anne Gardner
#25. 'The Fever' is a one-person play. I decided I would perform it myself, and I decided I would not perform it in theaters, because the character in the play says certain things that I meant.
Wallace Shawn
#26. Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.
Patrick Marber
#27. Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.
Eli Wallach
#28. You might change the props
and the actors, the play of human history is always the same
Orson Scott Card
#29. Those who have advanced rise to the mind which is in the head, - they have the play of their mental movements in the head itself. But all these are inside the body; man is, as it were, shut up in a box, his entire consciousness is confined within the organism. This imprisonment has to be undone.
Sri Aurobindo
#30. Miss. Wells said she would have to replace him in the play, Toby said he would visit
Angela Taylor
#31. On the chessboard of his godforsaken existence, the pieces were lined up, the play preordained. Man, so many times in life you didn't get to pick your path because the way you went was decided for you.
Free will was such bullshit.
-Vishous's thoughts
J.R. Ward
#32. Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled ... in a unique and inimitable way.
Vladimir Nabokov
#33. There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating.The more topical the play the more it dates.
George Bernard Shaw
#34. I'm not a director who feels I should be in your face all the time. I really want you to watch the actors and listen to the play.
Jack O'Brien
#35. A lot of young girls who came to see me in 'Legally Blonde' have come to see 'Hedda,' and they hadn't heard of the play either, just like I was before I did it! If I can bring a younger generation to see an Ibsen play; that's just brilliant.
Sheridan Smith
#36. I was in a Broadway musical called Big Time Buck Wright.The play didn't make it but I was a success. It lasted six days but I sung four songs and there were critics, seriously, in New York who said that my part was perfect. So I can beat Joe Frazier singing.
Muhammad Ali
#37. After the play, he counts on playing cards,
and he on a wild night in some girl's arms -
why, in a cause like this, must you poor fools
so sorely try the Muses' kindness
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#38. In the given circumstances you must be rooted in the play. Do not depart from the play. Don't cut yourself off from your partner in the scene, or partners.
Constantin Stanislavski
#39. I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of 'The Village,' came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.
Bryce Dallas Howard
#40. Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play.
James P. Carse
#41. I hate imperialism. I detest colonialism. And I fear the consequences of their last bitter struggle for life. We are determined, that our nation, and the world as a whole, shall not be the play thing of one small corner of the world
Sukarno
#42. The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.
Tom Stoppard
#43. We're important, but not essential; valuable, but not indispensable. We have a part in the play, but we are not the main act. A song to sing, but we are not the featured voice. God is.
Max Lucado
#44. Human beings have illusions. The enlightened don't have illusions. They see things as they are, and in that seeing, they see ecstasy and joy. They see the play of life.
Frederick Lenz
#46. The play is so close to the reality ... It comes out of the heart.
Barbara Williams
#47. [The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.
Ben Jonson
#48. We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
James Thurber
#49. Ty squeezed him, and Zane watched the play of muscles as Ty rolled his hips and forced Zane further into him.
Abigail Roux
#50. The play's over, the house lights are up, the audience is gone, but I'm still on the damned stage.
Gregory Miller
#52. BURGESS
How do you like Moscow?
CORAL
Loathe it, darling. I cannot understand what those Three Sisters were on about. It gives the play a very sinister slant.
Alan Bennett
#53. The pessimistic coach complains about the play. The optimistic coach expects it to change. The realistic coach adjusts what he can control.
John Kessel
#54. The basic formula of life... SURVIVE. EAT. SHIT. FUCK. BUY A HOUSE and DIE. It's all been scripted. But there's no need to see the second act. You already know how the play ends, don't you?
Andrew Armacost
#55. We hope to do the Spanish Tragedy based on the play by Thomas Kyd.
Alex Cox
#56. Standing on the edge with my patients - abiding with them - means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.
Christine Montross
#57. I think people need to understand that with plays and with cinema, when you hear about it, call and get a ticket then or go and see it then. It's especially with the play, which I can do because it's a limited run.
Alfre Woodard
#58. No, I tell you what I like is having the play close after a decent run and looking back on it and saying, yes, I did that, and wasn't it wonderful? Because while you're doing it, it is really tough. It is so hard.
Mary Tyler Moore
#59. Talk about high school and what we identify with in the play; things that have happened to us and all of our high school experiences that we could bring to this. And to talk about what everyone knows in each specific scene.
Sarah Steele
#60. Ford didn't know what to do with Mister Roberts that wasn't repeating what was successful in New York. He was trying to do things to the play that would be his in the film.
Henry Fonda
#61. When you're doing a play and you're afraid of a scene, that's the scene you should embrace, because that's the scene that will tell you something about the play.
Raul Esparza
#62. They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines."
"Maybe that's why it's hard to tell if we're living in a tragedy or a farce."
"We need more special effects and dance numbers.
Bill Watterson
#63. I was a Russian dancer in my elementary school production of 'Fiddler on the Roof' when I was in third grade or fourth grade. I was one of the younger kids accepted into the play, and the plays were pretty impressive, let me say.
Lizzy Caplan
#64. If you're in a successful play and the play is working well - I mean successful because the audiences like it, the audiences respond well - it's a pleasure.
Anthony Hopkins
#65. The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality; all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.
Irvin D. Yalom
#66. Her German language made my arteries harden-
I've no annuity for the play we blew.
I chartered an aluminum canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.
Robert Lowell
#67. Good Gad! It looks like the last act of Hamlet in here.
Turnip banged his head against his clenched fists, making inarticulate moaning noises.
Pinchingdale gave him an odd look. 'I had no idea you felt so strongly about the play, Fitzhugh.
Lauren Willig
#68. I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.
Charles De Lint
#69. I did a 20-minute selection of scenes from the play 'Spring Awakening' in college, well before the musical came around, so when the musical was becoming a hot thing, and I was reading interviews with Duncan Sheik about how he came to do the music, I think it's interesting.
Allison Tolman
#70. As an actor you become that lighting rod between the person who made the play and the audience.
Christopher Walken
#71. The Color Purple received four Tony nominations; the play is highly looked at and it's a must see for everyone. I just want to carry on what Jennifer Hudson has done and help the team get to the finish line.
Heather Headley
#72. I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.
Edward Albee
#73. If you have the sense of participation in sports or athletics, of being a player, then you are not really into the Zen mind. In Zen mind there is no sense of self in the play.
Frederick Lenz
#74. I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.
August Wilson
#75. After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. You can't go backwards and regain your ignorance; you have to move forward.
Zeena Schreck
#76. In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall - that when the play is finished, it's done - but now I realise it's more like gardening; you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You're part of a thing that's living.
Lee Hall
#77. Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.
Richard Rhodes
#78. My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;
Judge not the play before the play is done:
Her plot has many changes; every day
Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.
Francis Quarles
#79. You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
Tom Stoppard
#81. I wouldn't say it was lucky. We executed the play well. We should have had another one (TD). Obviously, if you do what's right on and off the field, I think the Lord steps in and plays a part in it. Magic happens
Austin Collie
#82. The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
#83. Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
James Evans
#84. God always comes up with a third act twist
and we won't know until we die whether the play was a comedy or a tragedy.
Joan Rivers
#86. The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.
Eric Hoffer
#87. It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
Margaret Mead
#88. In the play we have the messy he-loves-her, she-loves-him, she-loves-him-too structure, and, to add even more confusion to the mix, the real love story is between the two ladies.
Norbert Leo Butz
#90. But naturally Jackson's giving Danny the play-by-play because, hello, if you were Jackson and Gloria liked you, wouldn't you be renting a billboard about it?
Susane Colasanti
#92. You're always fighting the contradiction between the supposed intimacy of a two-person conversation and the blunt reality that you're trying to sell the play to people who are sitting maybe too far away from you.
Wallace Shawn
#93. He had an animal's maturity, in which the play of kittens and puppies no longer has a function. His spectrum lay between terror and contentment.
Theodore Sturgeon
#94. The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.
Linda Lavin
#95. In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged. Individuals trump the category.
Iain McGilchrist
#96. I don't want to restrict the life of a play to a particular production. The original actors might leave after the first six months, and I want the play to last 30 or 40 years. You write for the character, not the actor on the stage.
Neil Simon
#97. Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: It's about to make me a lot of money.
Clive James
#98. It was really interesting to be editing the film [Trust] in New York and directing the play in Chicago, and one definitely informed the other. The play probably benefitted more because I realized what scenes could be cut, and I cut those scenes from the play.
David Schwimmer
#99. My father assigned me to keep his scrapbooks. At first I was interested in reading only his rave notices, but I got interested in reading what the critics were saying about whether the play was good or not.
Dorothy Fields
#100. While it is easy to get caught up in the beliefs and attitudes of others, it is easier still to make one's self a victim of circumstance. Victims of circumstance believe they have no power over their lives, since they are merely the play-things of fate. Since they believe this, it is therefore so.
Stephen Richards
