Theater Plays Quotes

#1. As a teenager, I wanted to write novels. By college, it was theater, plays, and then, shortly, it was film.

Richard Linklater

#2. I did a number of local children's theater plays growing up, but in 5th grade, I had some good times on stage making people laugh as a troll in 'The Hobbit.' That solidified my dream to be on 'Saturday Night Live,' which was hugely influential for me growing up.

Lauren Lapkus

#3. I had a teacher senior year in high school. He was a theater teacher, and he basically was a little bit like 'High School Musical.' He kind of encouraged the jocks to get involved with the plays. I did it as kind of a senior year lark.

D. B. Sweeney

#4. I adopted two children, then I got eye disease and five rounds of surgery. I went blind in one eye, then the other eye, and that went on for three or four years. I got very enamored and involved with the theater and did a lot of plays.

John Patrick Shanley

#5. Before discovering theater, I was sloughing off and didn't have any passion for school. Then I couldn't get enough. All of a sudden, I was getting good parts in all of these plays. I just loved it. I started getting A's in acting, directing and technical theater. I found something that clicked.

Gary Sinise

#6. I love film scores and opera, and I wanted to work in those forms. But theater was more accessible. And no one was doing this in the late 1970s, when I began working in the theater. So, I have written scores for thirteen plays, which are not musicals, but straight plays.

Jeff Britting

#7. I trained in theater. And I started in theater with my first two jobs doing stage plays.

Kit Harington

#8. I started out with a business and psychology major, and then I started doing plays and concentrating more and more on theater. I dropped out of college and moved to New York and studied theater at The Neighborhood Playhouse. I did that for a couple of years and then got an agent.

Linden Ashby

#9. I certainly did plays in high school and community theater, and I want to get back on the stage.

Busy Philipps

#10. There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets.

Marsha Norman

#11. Tim Robbins had real confidence in college. He literally stole actors from the theater department at UCLA to be in his plays. The department heads got so mad at him.

Daphne Zuniga

#12. By the time I was 10, I was doing plays for Phoenix theater. My first lead role was as the Stinky Cheese Man. I got a taste of the limelight, and I just couldn't stop. It was a way for me to be the artistic, geeky kid that I was, and not get beat up.

Alexandra Shipp

#13. For me, it's all I've wanted to do. I did local plays and productions, local theater groups and anything that involved it. And then, I went and studied it, attended drama school and got my first lucky break in the theater in London, and just went from there.

Colin Morgan

#14. I majored in theater in college. I did a couple of plays in high school, and I really enjoyed it, so I went to Illinois Wesleyan University and got a degree, and then I went back to Chicago and started doing theater in all the companies around the city for about 11 years before I moved out to L.A.

Kevin Dunn

#15. I want to do theater and I am looking forward to doing more Television and Movies. I also want to direct some plays in theater workshops for people with disabilities.

Chris Burke

#16. Being a theater actor, I've done a lot of plays where I've seen someone else play the same role in another production. Especially with the classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams.

Jacki Weaver

#17. I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.

Ben Brantley

#18. I'd love to do theater. I've done so many plays in my life. I still think of that as my main thing.

Taylor Schilling

#19. One of the things that gives me a lot of pleasure about both the solo show and the book is that it tells people about my dad. He really was an important man. He was a kind of pioneer of regional theater. He was the first American producer to ever produce all of Shakespeare plays.

John Lithgow

#20. Voiceover work reminds me of old-time radio. When I was little I used to sneak and stay up at night and listen to Mystery Radio Theater - I loved all those old radio plays.

Virginia Madsen

#21. I always loved theater and acting in plays and directing, writing little plays and directing friends in plays.

Todd Haynes

#22. I had been doing all my school plays, elementary school, middle school, and high school, and then summer. I'd wanted to act for a long time, and I thought I was going to go to college and do theater, go that route. But 'Superbad' kind of fell on my lap. I was very, very lucky for that.

Christopher Mintz-Plasse

#23. The truth is that a lot of plays aren't political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there's a crisis, a national crisis.

Frank Rich

#24. I really didn't know much about theater. After I signed on, I started reading a lot of Sam Shepard plays just to brush up on my history and do some research.

Taissa Farmiga

#25. I work constantly but I work at a lot of different things. You know, I run a theater company in New York, I direct plays, act in plays, in movies, so I try to keep it eclectic.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#26. When I was in high school, I was the guy directing plays after class. I started my first theater company at 19, and my second theater company at 21. I've always been a guy who doesn't do well with the passive nature of being an actor.

Matthew Lillard

#27. I never went to school for directing. I studied theater with a director. I followed plays to see how a director would talk to the actors. I tried to make my own school.

Denis Villeneuve

#28. I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.

Atom Egoyan

#29. I was very fortunate that a teacher saw that I read a lot and got bored very easily and had a lot of energy, so she said, 'You've got to go to this youth theater.' I joined Manchester Youth Theatre when I was really young, and I just loved putting on and being involved in plays and telling stories.

Justin Chadwick

#30. 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

#31. Theater was definitely part of my roots. My father would take me to plays, and then my mother was always on the lookout for other talent and taking me to see plays. I saw Frank Langella in 'Dracula' ... Great, great performances. I was a theater rat, hanging out backstage.

Christian Slater

#32. Here in America, every single actor, since they were little boys, they sing and dance and perform like angels. We don't do that. We are actors who work in a theater in very classic performances or plays.

Javier Camara

#33. What Lou Tyrrell creates when he has a theater is a birthing center for new plays.

Israel Horovitz

#34. While I was growing up all over, in all my different schools, I was always doing theater, auditioning for plays.

Hannah Simone

#35. By the time I was twelve, I had started my own theater company and was doing plays in the backyard and the front yard and all over the neighborhood, so, you know, I was definitely a lifer even back when I was 10.

Carrie Preston

#36. I think I can work anywhere, but you don't get the same kind of inspiration everywhere. New York theater has become a big inspiration for me. I only started writing for the stage myself because I like to see the good, mostly off-Broadway plays in New York.

Daniel Kehlmann

#37. The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism,' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.

Tony Kushner

#38. I had always wanted to be an actress. I went to summer theater camp from kindergarten on up until high school, and always had the leads in all the plays - even though they were at the YMCA - but it was something I always wanted to do.

Chloe Sevigny

#39. Please God, I hope my experience in downtown theater isn't over, because I'd love to keep making weird plays. I can't wait for Charles Isherwood to call my next play 'sit-com-y' and tell me to stick to writing television.

Elizabeth Meriwether

#40. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theater business, management of men.

William Butler Yeats

#41. This sounds so bogus, but I would love to, at some point when my kids are in college, is just go do a whole season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and do a year of plays. Most actors miss the days of live theater.

Donal Logue

#42. I went to Northwestern in Chicago, in Evanston, and then I ended up trickling down in Chicago theater. I did a bunch of plays, but I was non-equity. For a lot of people, non-equity means you're not yet professional. But for me, if you're in a mainstream theater, you're doing something real.

Denis O'Hare

#43. You aren't allowed back until you've learned to willingly suspend disbelief.

Rebecca Murphy

#44. My oldest brother used to take me to the theater. The first play he took me to see was 'Black Comedy,' then he took me to see 'Butley.' We'd see all these British plays. And 'Hello, Dolly,' with Pearl Bailey. I was unconsciously thinking, 'Gee, I would love to be able to do that.'

Nathan Lane

#45. I was a theater dork in high school and did all the plays. My theater teacher in high school, Janet Spahr, was absolutely incredible and mentored me throughout school. She taught me a lot about relying on my instincts.

Melissa Rauch

#46. My first paying job was a in a production of Neil LaBute's 'Bash: Latter Day Plays' at the Union Street theater in Borough. I played the 'Medea Redux' character. That was my first job out of drama school. I can't remember how much I got paid. I'm sure it was pennies.

Juliet Rylance

#47. Oh, come on! Nobody's favorite color is BROWN!

Lee Blessing

#48. I often teach a graduate theater seminar on Greek tragedy in performance. I usually begin by saying that no matter what technological advances occur, the wisdom of these plays will never be obsolete.

Neil Patrick Harris

#49. People may know me from films, but theater is my first love. I did about 35 plays before I even landed my first screen role. I'm very comfortable on stage, and theater is not something you can just wing.

Sanaa Lathan

#50. I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#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 started out doing a lot of theater, a lot of Shakespeare, classic plays.

Andre Holland

#53. I've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.

Sam Shepard

#54. In Michigan, if you want to act, it's local theater, it's high school theater and it's going to camp and putting on plays in the summer, and I always loved doing that. There was something that just drew me to it.

James Wolk

#55. Depending on what your interest in theater is, I always recommend working on plays. It's a great way to be introduced to the field, and also a great way to be seen by agents and representation. I'm also a great advocate for studying acting at a drama school or a college.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#56. I like roles that are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, and there's special appeal in exploring these slightly forgotten plays that people might think of as subjects for academic term papers instead of live theater.

Geoffrey Rush

#57. I'd always loved the theater, and I began by writing plays. I work in the theater a lot in the UK, and I've worked in the theater out here quite a bit. Everything else - the films - followed as a consequence of that.

Lucinda Coxon

#58. One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.

Arthur Penn

#59. I know I'm as comfortable doing period as I am contemporary. I suppose we grow up with it in a sense, in the theater. We get to put on costumes and play a lot of period dramas or plays so we're exposed to it a little bit more I think because of our theatrical background.

Ioan Gruffudd

#60. Occasionally, I have time to go to the theater, and I think for a minute, 'Man, I'd really love to be doing a play right now.' Because I loved doing plays when I was doing them. Then I think, 'I want to do it right now, but will I want to do that Sunday matinee in six weeks?'

Stephen Lang

#61. Oh, I was completely hooked on movies and plays and theater from the time I was a day old - I was very, very early on in love with movies and I loved plays.

Bob Balaban

#62. For a production that suggests a mysterious dreamscape, I have a particular affection for the Vivian Beaumont Theater. It is the largest dramatic space available in New York City in terms of plays, although musicals have been done there very successfully as well.

Jack O'Brien

#63. You know, I love plays. I love the smell of a theater. The old rooms and the carpet and all that stuff. I love to tell stories. Even before I was doing music, I saw myself as a director.

R. Kelly

#64. I decided at age 9, but I was reinforced at age 13 when a teacher told me I had talent. I can't say she really motivated me because I already knew. I knew I had talent. I went to the Jewish community theater and got in plays there. Then I went for the movies.'

Richard Dreyfuss

#65. The plays should have the half-life of plutonium.

Suzan-Lori Parks

#66. Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed.

Moses Mendelssohn

#67. My limited theater experience was when I was a kid starting out: two or three plays. I was good in one and mediocre in the other. My problem is that I have other interests.

Michael Keaton

#68. My first thought about acting, growing up here in New York, was theater, and I feel like I need to force myself to go get my ass kicked in a rehearsal room and do one of those plays at some point.

Paul Dano

#69. I used to do lots of independent films and for a while I was very content living in New York City and doing independent movies and off-Broadway theater. I loved it, I had a really good time doing that, and I worked on a lot of projects that are very dear to my heart, both plays and films.

Jared Harris

#70. A very dear friend of mine great actress named Wendy Rich Stetson was very active in the theater department at Amherst and I went to all the plays she was in, and it became very clear to me that what she was doing was something I wanted to be doing.

John Cariani

#71. A lot of the best acting training I had was in junior high and high school. We had very demanding directors and did real plays. You put our plays up against any theater troupe of any age, and they usually did pretty damn well.

Jello Biafra

#72. My mom was an actress in the local Seattle theater doing experimental plays.

Rainn Wilson

#73. I played a little basketball, but basketball interfered with theater season. That's when we did our term plays and did nutshell versions of Shakespeare for English classes. And, believe me, I got a fair amount of looks from the guys on the team. 'You're in theater but you can play football?'

Dennis Haysbert

#74. And then it was like, wait, you can go to college and study theater? And act in plays? This is almost a racket, you know. And then when the opportunity came along to do it professionally, I thought I'd won the lottery.

Tom Hanks

#75. I'm a kid that went to theater school. I thought I was going to be making my living doing plays regionally or in New York or on Broadway, and maybe if I got lucky I would do a movie here or there.

Matt Bomer

#76. Well, I've been acting for 50 years now, professionally. I've been acting a lot longer. My mother reckons I was acting when I got out of the womb. But because I've been working in the theater, I've probably only done about 25 movies but I've done more than 100 plays.

Jacki Weaver

#77. When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

Annette Bening

#78. I always wanted to be an actor. It sort of prevented that whole - I never had any of that kind of angsty period old and doing musicals at camp and community theater and plays at school; it was just always what I most enjoyed and always what I intended to pursue.

Joshua Malina

#79. 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

#80. Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

Tom Stoppard

#81. I started off doing plays as a theater actor. But I never thought of it in terms of it leading anywhere. I was just trying to be the best actor that I could be in the context of what I was doing.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#82. I thought I was going to be a theater actor. I moved to New York after college and did some plays and worked a lot. Once the realities of living as a theatrical actor hit me, I realized I wanted to start making a little bit of money and not have to bartend and work in theater.

Zachary Knighton

#83. Seems like everybody has seen 'Cooley High.' That's what put me on the map. Garrett Morris and I go way back, even before the movie. Great guy. We've done theater and stage plays together, Lincoln Center and all kinds of things.

Glynn Turman

#84. It never occurred to me that I was a leading man until I was 19 years old. I had been acting since I was 10, so that's nine years and 30 or 40 plays, in school and summer stock, professional theater, too.

Christopher Reeve

#85. When I auditioned for 'Animal House,' I had only done some plays at a local dinner theater in Virginia.

Stephen Furst

#86. I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.

Wes Anderson

#87. For me the whole world is like a gigantic theater in which I am the only spectator without opera glasses. The orchestra plays the prelude to the third act, the stage is far away as in a dream, my heart swells with delight - and you want to blind me with a pair of half-ruble spectacles?

Isaac Babel

#88. I'm in the theater because of two plays: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Death of a Salesman.'

Mike Nichols

#89. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.

Eugene O'Neill

#90. The modern economics of the theater is such that we write plays with fewer and fewer characters.

John Patrick Shanley