Top 100 The Theater Is Quotes
#1. The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.
Will Rogers
#2. If the theater is the refuge of the conversationalist whose friend is mute and whose mistress is insipid, then conversation, even the most exquisite, is the pleasure of men without imagination.
Marcel Proust
#3. The theater is a kind of international language, and I like it. But I have a practical bent of mind, too. In any other field, I could make only about a tenth as much as I do acting. That's why I want to be a producer. It pays better, and you have more control.
Carolyn Jones
#4. The theater is the thing I love doing most.
Judi Dench
#5. The terrible thing about acting in the theater is that you have to do it at night.
Katharine Hepburn
#6. The theater is who I am - it's where I feel the most inspired, the most at home, the most useful.
Mary-Louise Parker
#7. The theater is necessary. Dance is necessary. Song is necessary. The arts are necessary- they are a necessary part of our lives
Barack Obama
#8. I honestly consider that the greatest gift to me, is the reaction that I get from my work. That is a given which I never, ever take for granted. But to be given that by audiences, individuals, on the street, in the theater, is an extraordinary feeling.
Angela Lansbury
#9. The theater is a tough place. It's not cushioned the way it is in film and television.
Patti LuPone
#10. I think the theater is basically the boot camp for the actor. If you can survive the rigors of an eight-show-a-week schedule and be at your best all the time, you can handle virtually everything because no other craft requires you to get it right every single time.
Corey Reynolds
#11. Failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.
Lillian Hellman
#12. What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.
William Dean Howells
#13. The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.
Mary McCarthy
#14. Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
Antonin Artaud
#16. The reason why Hollywood cranks out so many sequels and adaptations is because the audience is so overwhelmed with choices, the only way to get them in the theater is to give them something familiar.
David Wong
#17. I happen to love working in cinema, but the theater is always there ... you know, and I would never shut the door on it. Even though it's been quite a bit of time since I've done a play, last one was in New York.
Michael York
#18. Unfortunately, because the theater is always a poor relation when it comes to making the nut, it's not easy to get the audience in to see a play, unless you have a name that is recognizable, that the audience wants to see and is prepared to pay the $125 to see.
Angela Lansbury
#19. The modern economics of the theater is such that we write plays with fewer and fewer characters.
John Patrick Shanley
#20. The trick about the theater is at the end of the day you cannot take any of it personally.
William Ivey Long
#21. My only regret in the theater is that I could never sit out front and watch me.
John Barrymore
#22. Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic.
Jennifer Stone
#23. The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
Arthur Miller
#25. I love the theater because the theater is alive. The audience is right there.
Chita Rivera
#26. Neither should the theater in our country be regarded as a luxury. It is a necessity because in order to make democracy work the people must increasingly participate; they can't participate unless they understand; and the theater is one of the great mediums of understanding.
Hallie Flanagan
#27. The theater is the only money-making business I know in which haste apparently rules from first to last.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#28. The shows at the Hilton are the most exciting shows I've ever done. The stage is huge, but the theater is intimate, so we can have a magnificent production and still connect with the audience.
Barry Manilow
#29. The theater is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it.
Augusto Boal
#30. In New York, the theater is a destination point. In Los Angeles, no matter how provocative, how successful, how star-studded the theater event may be, it is, at best, a second-class citizen.
Jason Alexander
#31. I'm an extrovert, I like to gesticulate and talk loud and stuff, and the theater is easy for me.
Jamie Campbell Bower
#32. Writing for the theater is a whole different can of fish. The music now has the responsibility of so many things. The plot could be giving you different views of the character; the emotional highlights of a moment.
Frank Wildhorn
#33. They want families to come to New York and go to the theater, so the theater is all geared toward family entertainment. It's money, you know.
Sandra Bernhard
#34. What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
Edward Albee
#35. What I love about the theater is that you know who you're acting for: your audience. And the thing I find really hard in film is, you don't. The audience is invisible. And we're sitting there, hoping there's other people out there.
Cate Blanchett
#36. A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.
Alan Rickman
#37. Being creative and making money in the theater is very challenging.
Val Kilmer
#39. To me, what is important in the theater is that we don't want to make a conclusion. We don't want to make a statement, don't want to say what something is. We want to ask, 'What is it?'
Robert Wilson
#40. Our only competition in the theater is boredom, because if I'm bored with a play, if I'm revolted by a play on stage, with the Broadway prices, especially today, I'm going to walk out and not come back and pay that price again.
Jerome Lawrence
#41. Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#42. The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress.
Ingmar Bergman
#43. Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.
Alan Jay Lerner
#44. The movies are not my first priority - the theater is.
Kevin Spacey
#45. The theater is so disappointing, really, that it's hard to go again and again. It's just too heartbreaking. I'd rather watch football or play a game or read.
John Malkovich
#46. The home of Rugby Union is in Twickenham - just outside London in the suburbs, where I live. I'm mad for it. The trouble with being an actor and being in the theater is that you always miss the games.
Alexander Hanson
#47. What happens in Israel, it's not so divided between being a film actor, or a TV actor - usually, we just do everything. I do theater, film, and television, and the theater is mostly financed by the government.
Meital Dohan
#48. The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.
Antonin Artaud
#49. A film is the director's medium. The theater is an actor's.
Hugh Jackman
#50. The theater is the 'church' and when I'm on that stage I am the Priest/Pastor, it is a pure spiritual journey for me.
Richard Cabral
#51. The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.
Marsha Norman
#52. The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.
John Steinbeck
#53. Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.
Lillian Hellman
#55. What I love about the theater is the work ethic. I grew up with it.
Marlo Thomas
#56. Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.
Brooks Atkinson
#57. As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
August Wilson
#58. 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
#59. Let's just say that the theater is not for the faint of heart.
Phylicia Rashad
#60. The greatest sound in the theater is silence.
Kevin Spacey
#61. The visceral experience of seeing a movie in three dimensions, coming at you in the theater, is obviously here to stay, because it is a unique experience. I think that kind of format is only appropriate for some genres, but I'm all for it.
Cary Elwes
#62. 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
#63. The theater is where I belonged; I simply wanted to be an actress my whole life.
Loni Anderson
#64. 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
#65. The most you play a character in the theater is, like, a couple months, and then you put it away.
Adam Driver
#66. The theater is a school we shall never have done with studying and learning.
Robert Edmond Jones
#67. The theater is too deep for me. I prefer bicycling.
Jean Gabin
#68. Theater isn't there to provide answers. Only possibilities. I just ask the questions. But I believe hope comes from the fact that there is a potential for redemption. At the core, that's what matters in the theater I'm attracted to. Do we dare to hope? Do we allow ourselves to hope?
Joe Mantello
#69. No, the horror genre is not my first love. I don't run to the theater to see horror films.
Amanda Righetti
#70. All the world's a stage," is a metaphor comparing the whole world to a theater stage.
Stephen Davis
#71. The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
A.R. Rahman
#72. In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.
Stephen Sondheim
#73. Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.
Arthur Miller
#74. I auditioned equally for film and theater. The difference is that theater has seasons, while film, it's always happening.
Elizabeth Olsen
#75. The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.
Germaine Greer
#76. I'm not photographing the model in the classic sense; the model is playing a part in my photographs. It's more like theater. I always work with models I know, and I let them participate in deciding how to act their part.
Kim Weston
#77. In many respects, theater is still grappling with problems of reality and representation that the visual art movement realized were unimportant many years ago.
Tim Crouch
#78. I believe that the story is the most important element of any medium whether it's theater, film, TV.
Chad Lowe
#79. The things that I have done that haven't been as successful have been things that have been largely out of the public view, which is great. It's terrible, when you're a theater writer, to have a big flop publicly.
Robert Lopez
#80. I don't see many people with longevity anymore. Everything was harder when I started, and you had to take acting lessons, do theater parts, work on connections and then get lucky. The technology is good, but it's also a hindrance for longevity.
Dustin Diamond
#81. I grew up in the theater, my mother is an actress, I was always around the world of acting and theater.
Alicia Keys
#82. Acting is what I love to do.I understand the differences between the different formats. But I enjoy whether it be film, TV or in the theater.
Carter Jenkins
#83. Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.
Benjamin Netanyahu
#84. It's all been a bad joke that just ran out of control. I got into food for fun but the business got a mind of its own. Now - my good Lord - look where it has gotten me. My products are on supermarket shelves, in cinemas, in the theater. And they say show business is odd.
Paul Newman
#85. What's missing in the musical theater is producers willing to nurture new work, raise the money and put it on.
Harold Prince
#86. I come from a theater background, and if you're doing a play, your audience is right there, and you're able to have that one-on-one experience. Doing more TV now, when fans come up to me on the street and talk to me on social media, that's a way to bridge that gap.
Samira Wiley
#87. The Old Vic is a beautiful theater to work in. It's quite a large house, but it has a feeling of intimacy.
Jennifer Ehle
#88. Theater in Chicago will always be my first love. It started careers for me and about 50 of my friends. We all love coming back. As soon as the TV show is over, I'll be back in Chicago, doing live theater.
William Petersen
#89. In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.
Tracy Letts
#90. And Twin Peaks, the Film is the craziest film in the history of cinema. I have no idea what happened, I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground.
Jacques Rivette
#91. I come from the theater, where the response to your work is immediate, and I suppose there's a part of me that still craves that.
Bryan Cogman
#92. I think anybody who has been in the theater, prefers it. Television is a ... factory. You turn out things on a revolving assembly line. You don't have time to perfect anything in television.
Gale Gordon
#93. A new star has been born and Vera's performance brings alive the desolate life of O'Neil's young heroine in a natural talent that is so fresh and yet so ageless.
Rajiv Kapoor
#94. When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice
and many voices have to be suggested.
Pablo Casals
#95. The joy of my career is I've been very blessed to be able to be an actor in major films, television, theater, and also British radio. In fact, my dream as an actor when I started out was to be able to work in all the media. Thankfully, that's what I'm being given to do.
David Suchet
#96. Film and theater are about misdirection and making the audience see something. I find it interesting. One of the things we do in 'True Blood' is shoot all of our stunts in camera. Instead of doing some kind of visual effect, we try to make it happen.
Stephen Moyer
#97. My favorite audience is everybody. I worked in a drive-in theater from the time I was 8 years old until I went to college, and I'm accustomed to everybody can buy a ticket and everybody should be taken into account.
Twyla Tharp
#98. If theater is ritual, then dance is too ... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.
Paulo Coelho
#99. Making a film or doing a play are completely different experiences and entirely fulfilling, but completely unique. I also think one complements the other. People often say that theater is about flexing your muscles, and is actually real acting, whereas I sort of disagree.
Eddie Redmayne
#100. Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.
Lewis Black
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