Top 100 Theater Life Quotes
#1. I love the theater community and theater life, and would love to figure out the distinctive differences between Broadway and the West End.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#2. My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.
Robert Wilson
#3. I come from the theater, so for me rehearsal is vital and a way of life. There are many film directors who don't believe in it and some actors who prefer not to rehearse.
Hugh Jackman
#4. Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.
Israel Horovitz
#5. Everybody has a public life, and they have their own private life. Everybody has their secrets. Everybody has their own private, you know, agonies as well as joys. And that's what great drama, whether it's the movies or the theater, that's what it shows.
Annette Bening
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. My mother had been an actress and we came from that world in New York, the theater world and the downtown sort of theater scene, and so I guess we didn't really have what you'd call like a Hollywood kind of life at all.
Martha Plimpton
#10. I had one of the best days of my life. I spent the afternoon with my two kids and my ex-wife at Serendipity. Then I came to the theater, and you know, I think I did the play the best I've ever done it.
Gabriel Byrne
#11. Judith (sadly): A change has come over my children of late. I have tried to shut my eyes to it, but in vain. At my time of life one must face bitter facts!
Noel Coward Sir
#12. I believe in the theater; I believe in it as the first glamorizer of thought. It restores dramatic dynamics and their relations to life size.
Laurence Olivier
#13. Theater will always be a huge part of my life. The high I get from doing theater is not, quite honestly, matched by many things. I like the fact that when you step out on the stage, for that given night, for better or for worse, you are the master of the boards. I love it to death.
Chris Pine
#14. There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater.
Charlie Kaufman
#15. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.
Victor Hugo
#16. From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.
Alexander Koch
#17. The theater has fallen into the hands of real estate men and syndicates and those who have no love or interest in the stage or its life, but who have considered it principally as a means to make money.
Eva Le Gallienne
#18. I love theater. I love the idea that you can transform, become somebody else, and look at life with a completely new perspective. I love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen.
Natasha Tsakos
#19. Since I was 19, I've had the most fun possible every single day, even when I had a rough life. It was the army which taught me about life, and the theater which taught me how good it could be.
Michael Caine
#20. If I was discovered by anyone, it would be Stephen O'Neil, who saw me in a play at Williamstown and introduced me to my team who I'm still with today. He was the first person to introduce me to the film and TV world. Other than that, I just assumed I would be a theater actor my whole life.
Logan Marshall-Green
#21. I like time off because I also have a life outside of theater.
Estelle Parsons
#22. Having grown up in a racist culture where 2 and 2 are not 5, I have found life to be incredibly theatrical and theater to be profoundly lifeless.
Beah Richards
#23. From the time that I was in high school, my life really revolved around live theater, so it almost feels genetic.
Philip Baker Hall
#24. Theater was a big part of my life from the beginning.
Megan Hilty
#25. I won't go back to the theater. I like some of the things they're doing but it's different now, not something I could do. I'll go on making films the rest of my life.
Elia Kazan
#26. I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself
Antonin Artaud
#27. Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.
William Ralph Inge
#28. Because I'd only done theater, that's really what I thought most of my life would be. I always figured that movies would be a part of it at some point. I didn't know how or when.
David Morse
#29. I came from Texas, I was studying theater at NYU, and I thought for sure that my lot in life would be to get the best bartending job I could find and do theater in New York. And that was a good life.
James Roday
#30. I love the theater, but if I had to choose, I would choose a film at this time in my life. Something meaty, to sink my teeth into.
Jeff Daniels
#31. When you go to the theater, you are slipping out of your life into someone else's imaginary world.
Robert Krulwich
#32. I've been performing my whole life. My mom signed me up for a theater program when I was five - I was the evil queen in 'Once Upon a Mattress.'
Lilla Crawford
#33. I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.
Ariana Grande
#35. I think the hardest thing I've had to learn is that just because people might speak a certain way in real life doesn't mean it's engaging in the theater.
Paul Downs Colaizzo
#36. The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.
George Santayana
#37. 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
#38. I was probably singing before I could talk. Musical theater is my passion. If I could afford it, I would just do dinner theater and live a simple life.
Bethany Joy Lenz
#39. The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
Antonin Artaud
#40. I go to the theater because I need help dealing with my life; I want to see the greatest questions addressed. I need to see actors grappling with things that matter.
Ellen McLaughlin
#41. The theater let me dramatize inner struggles, the push-pull between the inner life and the world, the various selves I presented according to what each world required. And it let me use my body.
Margo Jefferson
#42. I didn't have any role models. I really thought I was doomed to this loveless, lonely life. I didn't know any gay people until I began doing theater.
Bryan Batt
#43. It was a weird moment in my life and a weird experience [doing a theater]. It made me think, "Gee, I don't know if I ever want to do this again." And I love theater. I love going. I love the experience of theater. But I am not sure it's for me.
Jodie Foster
#44. Pinchas Perry, the director of 'The Chicago 8,' offered me the role of the judge, and he did not know that, 35 years earlier, I'd played a judge in the theater production. So life has its own little twists and turns.
Philip Baker Hall
#45. I did an internship in the Silicon Valley during the Internet boom. I couldn't imagine sitting in a cubicle the rest of my life, so I gave acting a try. I would have been happy doing theater and making nothing.
Justin Chon
#46. We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
Thornton Wilder
#47. Theater is a space where you cross over from everyday life, because there are real people in that moment moving in front of you - you're being invited to believe in a story and cross that bridge.
Cate Blanchett
#48. Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything that is good in me.
Charlotte Bronte
#49. In the theater, as in life, we prefer a villain with a sense of humor to a hero without one.
Mignon McLaughlin
#50. I've sung my whole life. I did a lot of musical theater growing up, I sing in the shower, sing in the car, sing everywhere really, on set at Chuck, all the time. I like it, and I've always felt like I've had a knack for it, or a talent for it, on some level, I don't know.
Zachary Levi
#51. I wanted to be an actor because I wanted to be onstage. I wanted to do musical theater, and from that I realized I was interested in plays. I never imagined myself on television. I was so lucky to be onstage my whole life.
Jesse Tyler Ferguson
#52. I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.
Audra McDonald
#53. Since babyhood, I've always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church causes.
Judith Jamison
#54. I do think that it's better for a musical to live its life first because if you see it on the screen, would you like to go to the theater after that? Probably not. You've seen it. And that's the mystery of a musical that hasn't been filmed. You're bloody meant to go there and buy your ticket.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
#55. I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring, but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people ... They were the ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they came in. All of my long, long life, I have danced for those ten.
Ruth St. Denis
#56. Depression is something that seems really obscure when you see it in a theater, but when you talk to people who come to see it and hear their reactions, you realize that it is such a prevalent part of life and our society today that it really needed to be told, and still needs to be told.
Aaron Tveit
#57. In '75, the year both A Chorus Line and Chicago hit Broadway, my head spun around and I became the ultimate theater queen for life.
Michael Musto
#58. You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck.
Rick Moody
#59. I went to NYU Tisch for undergrad, and it was amazing. My life then was extremely experimental with acting. I did crazy theater where we would be rolling around on the floor. I would be playing grandmothers, and clowns, and all this crazy stuff. Then I would be doing Shakespeare eight hours a day.
Katie Lowes
#60. Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.
Irwin Shaw
#61. You never get anywhere until you figure out the difference between passion and compassion.
Cynthia Heimel
#62. I really had spent my whole life playing soccer, and the fact that I was willing to give that up for theater, that told me I was moving in that direction.
Peter Jacobson
#63. 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
#64. All I've done is live my life in the theater and loved it.
Marian Seldes
#65. The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
Arthur Miller
#66. Life is theater; everyone is an actor - some in the lead, some in the supporting cast.
Ryan Blair
#67. I'm satisfied. I am progressively making my life and my name in the surest and purest manner. If I catch on in the theater, as I think I will, all the doors will gladly open wide for me.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#68. I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater.
Luchino Visconti
#69. After 30 years in the theater, I'm used to having a great amount of control over what I do. But with '24', you place your character's life in the writers' hands, and you have no idea what's going to happen until you're sent the next pages.
Cherry Jones
#70. The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
Alfred Jarry
#71. Democracy is not theater - it determines life and death!
Mimi Kennedy
#72. One thing I'm a big fan of is the theater of the absurd. That's what I come from, that's what I love to do more than anything. What I love about absurdity is the words "comedy" and "drama" get thrown out the window and it's just life, which is absurd.
Michael Shannon
#73. When I doing dinner theater in high school, I was talking to a woman who had been in the business for a while and I said I want to act, that's all I want to do with my life and she said if you're serious then you need to hone every discipline you can.
Blair Underwood
#74. Life is a theater, you can choose to play the part of the strong, determined, winner or the weak, fearful loser. The choice is yours.
Stella Oladiran
#75. The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people.
Tony Kushner
#76. I had done a lot of plays, particularly at my own theater in LA, and it was the first time in my theatrical life where I didn't feel that my role was also to keep everybody else working hard.
Gregory Harrison
#77. I am inspired by great food, theater, books, the beach, black-and-white photography, and great vocalists, like Dianne Reeves, Alice Smith, and Shirley Horn. I am inspired by my mentor Diana Castle, who is guiding me towards a truth and honesty in my life and work that I have always longed for.
Erica Tazel
#78. Theater is the best. That's where you get the work done. You just really get in there and figure something out about a story or a character or life or the world. That's where magic stuff happens.
Michael Shannon
#79. Soon I worked during twelve years in theater works of the prestigious Theatre National Populaire. It was the best time of my life, the most difficult, the most interesting, the most exciting.
Maurice Jarre
#80. Wouldn't it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?
Patrick Stewart
#81. Performing in a live theater is absolutely unbeatable. It is something I have done my entire life and have a gift, it seems, for sharing thoughts live.
Val Kilmer
#82. Let's just say I can never be cast again after Ron Swanson. Then I have a life of theater and woodworking and my wife to look forward to, and that doesn't make me anything but very happy.
Nick Offerman
#83. I think as an actor you're lucky to have any film take on a life of its own long after it's left the theater.
Cary Elwes
#84. Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.
David Byrne
#85. I had spent time in New York, where I loved the idea that theater could be done up in tiny little rooms rather than for lots of money on a big stage, and be tied to ordinary life.
Garry Hynes
#86. I worked in theater my whole life. My mom was a drama teacher at my middle school. In high school, I was Drama Club President every year, and then I auditioned for conservatory acting programs.
Jenn Proske
#87. We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.
Antonin Artaud
#88. If you don't want your children to know the truth about life don't send 'em to the theater to see Moms 'cause I'm gonna tell them THE TRUTH, hear?
Moms Mabley
#89. The first seven years of my life, me, my mom and dad and my four older siblings lived in a suburb of Stockholm, and my mom was very active with directing theater. So I basically grew up at the theater on the floors of the shows, so I was really surrounded with music at a young age.
Erik Hassle
#90. Take the leap. If you love theater more than anything, take the leap. It's so rich if you give over fully to it; there are no halfers or returnsies in this business - if you don't ... There's no way to go other than full tilt with your life and job.
Michael Lomenda
#91. The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier.
Beau Willimon
#92. I wish to be moved. I cannot feel in life. I must have others do it for me in theater.
John Wilmot
#93. The universe is not for man alone, but is a theater of evolution for all living beings. Live and let live is its guiding principle. 'Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah' - Non-injury is the highest religion.
Virchand Gandhi
#94. There's life time and then there's theater time. On time in the theater means fifteen minutes early.
Oh. So they're all early in life time but just on time in theater time. Got it.
Suzanne M. Trauth
#95. I love the long-form rehearsal process with theater, brick by brick, to build another life.
Vik Sahay
#96. The Kessler Theater is one such gem, an Art Deco beauty ... for a slice of real life, there's always the Kessler.
Ben Fountain
#97. I liked being in a smaller theater. I love doing shows of all sizes, but sometimes it's nice to be in a smaller space and to strip away some of the music so that you can be a little less than larger-than-life; you can be a little more naturalistic.
Max Von Essen
#98. Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York.
Ira Sachs
#99. I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
William Shakespeare
#100. I love London because of the history. The times I've been there have been some of the best memories in my life. Singing there, seeing great theater - and the people like a Southern accent.
Kristin Chenoweth
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