Theatre The Quotes

#1. I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.

Isadora Duncan

#2. Broadway remains the closest thing we have to a national theatre, the place where the greatest number of people can potentially see new work. For an American playwright to say it doesn't matter is simply to capitulate to the current situation.

Tony Kushner

#3. One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.

Julia Gregson

#4. I love theatre because that is my foundation. So, if I had to make a choice in terms of where I get the most fulfillments, it would be theatre. The reaction is so immediate, unlike with TV and film.

Wendy Raquel Robinson

#5. To save the Theatre, the Theatre must be destroyed, and actors and actresses all die of the Plague ... they make art impossible.

Eleanora Duse

#6. You need three things in the theatre - the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something.

Kenneth Haigh

#7. The society girl meets more dangers than the girl on the stage. There is more danger at a tango tea than in the theatre. The actor is less dangerous than the dancing master.

Lillian Russell

#8. People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre - the notion of the 'theatrical' meaning something separate from life. If it doesn't relate to life, it doesn't relate to anything.

Brian Cox

#9. If great lecture is theatre, the future of learning is games.

Anant Agarwal

#10. From a very young age, I wanted to get up on stage whenever I went to the theatre - the actors just seemed to be having so much fun. One of my worries about theatre, in fact, is that the actors are quite often having more fun than the audience.

Olivia Williams

#11. In the theatre the audience wants to be surprised - but by things that they expect.

Tristan Bernard

#12. You don't choose the theatre; The theatre choses you

Susan Sullivan

#13. A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.

Soren Kierkegaard

#14. In theatre, the main objective is to make the art happy, not the audience! If you have to choose between the audience and the art, always choose the second! You must know that the audience will constantly pull you down; resist it and fly at the heights like an eagle!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#15. As in a theatre, the eyes of men, after a well-graced actor leaves the stage, are idly bent on him that enters next.

William Shakespeare

#16. I love New York City. The energy, the theatre, the art, the food, the people, the parks and streets. But I could say the same of London or Paris, too.

Pierce Brosnan

#17. I need theatre for my equilibrium because in theatre, the actors don't care so much about image, about celebrity; you are more independent.

Clotilde Hesme

#18. I've done a lot of costume drama and theatre - the National Theatre and In fact, most of my work at the theatre, at the National Theatre anyway, was period.

Brenda Blethyn

#19. It's pretty easy in theatre. The comedy's either physical or verbal, and you're looking at the whole frame at once. But TV executives want close-ups. I keep telling them to look at Preston Sturges' movies. He'll do a whole scene without a cut in it, and it's a riot.

Don Scardino

#20. The world 's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill.

Thomas Heywood

#21. The most important thing in human relationship is conversation.but people don't talk anymore,they don't sit down to talk and listen.They go to theatre,the cinema,watch television,listen to the radio,read books but they almost never talk.(pg114)

Paulo Coelho

#22. Wyndham's is a beautiful old theatre. The sensation on the stage isn't as different as you might think from the Royal Court.

Sophie Thompson

#23. Having done film, TV and theatre, the nicest final bit of the jigsaw is to do live comedy, because you can talk to the audience. It feels really natural to be able to laugh with them, but at the same time still be within the framework of a play.

Jessie Cave

#24. It's very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.

Laura Wade

#25. I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over again.

Sarah Waters

#26. The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and

Tom Stoppard

#27. In the theatre, the actor is given immediate feedback.

Charles Keating

#28. In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.

Jeremy Begbie

#29. I just wanted to be one of those actors who works at the National Theatre the whole time.

Robert Emms

#30. In the theatre the stage keeps the audience aware of the fictional nature of the action. The reader poring over a magazine, on the other hand, identifies what he sees in the photographs as real.

Gisele Freund

#31. I can get dressed earlier in the evening with every intention of going to a dance at midnight, but somehow after the theatre the thing to do seems to be either to go to bed or sit around somewhere. It doesn't seem possible that somewhere people can be expecting you at an hour like that.

Robert Benchley

#32. The lecture theatre - the place where information passes from the notebook of the lecturer to the notebook of the student without necessarily passing through the mind of either.

Jim White

#33. There are all sorts of reasons why I don't do much work in the theatre, the main one being that after two performances I feel I've given all I can. I hate repetition, I really do. It's like asking a painter to paint he same picture every day of his life.

Peter Cushing

#34. In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience.

Ian McKellen

#35. A perfect weekend in London has to start on Friday night, by going to the theatre, the Donmar or the National. It's a cliche for an actor, but I enjoy going as much as possible.

Helen McCrory

#36. Sorry," I said.
"Don't be sorry." She sent a sneer in the direction of Colin who'd rejoined his friends on the other side of the theatre. "The fact he's still breathing isn't your fault.

Michelle Rowen

#37. Performing on stage is my first love - it's why I wanted to be an actor in the first place - and 'Arcadia' is the highlight of my career so far. I love the intimacy of a live theatre audience - you can really squeeze every last drop out of each scene.

Tom Riley

#38. I've always loved and enjoyed the theatre, but I have to say that none of our sponsorships have been done because I'm one of those chairmen and chief executives who goes gooey-eyed about something. They are done for a very specific marketing and commercial agenda.

Lloyd Dorfman

#39. The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.

Will Rogers

#40. I saw 'Clueless' five times in the theatre when I was growing up.

Lizzy Caplan

#41. I do still like television very much, but the theatre does really have something special about it.

Sarah Sutton

#42. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.

Rene Descartes

#43. Every book should begin with attractive endpapers. Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins.

Cornelia Funke

#44. I want everyone to feel as much as possible as if they inhabit the same space. They more fluid the relationship between actor and audience, the better.

Christine Jones

#45. Hollywood is a very interesting place to deal with. And having been a theatre person, I was quite surprised by the slipperiness of some people in Holly-weird. There was a part of me that just said, 'If this is the way the game is played, I'm not sure I want to play it.'

Joyce DeWitt

#46. I like going to New York. I like the galleries and the theatre and the restaurants and bars and music. I think that city is more alive than Los Angeles.

Sara Gilbert

#47. Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff didn't like the word 'horror'. They, like I, went for the French description: 'the theatre of the fantastique'.

Christopher Lee

#48. Theatre is liberating because it only works if it's truthful - that's what it requires. That's not true of film: the camera does lie.

Helen McCrory

#49. People in America, they're getting dumber, they're getting less able to analyze something and think critically, and pick apart the underlying elements. And more and more ready to make a snap judgment regarding something at face value, which is too bad.

William Missouri Downs

#50. I get on with actors, and when I'm doing a theatre show, it's great being with them all the time. But we're all alike, and it's much nicer being with people who are different.

Phil Daniels

#51. I was never a joiner. I tried - I had people I admired and liked and wanted to hang with, but I ended up starting a theatre company and that took me back to Chicago ... I guess I wasn't a scenester in the end. Something must have worked out right, as I'm still here - but I'm only a binge socialite.

John Cusack

#52. I often make the analogy with tennis. Every match the rules are the same, but no game is ever the same. Theatre is like that. Every time is different.

Kevin Spacey

#53. Every character is a part of you and a part of the character that you are going to evolve into that you are not yet.

Angelina Jolie

#54. My biggest ambition when I was younger was to appear on stage at what was then Nimrod, which is the theatre where my father used to take me on Sunday afternoons to see matinees. The most extraordinary things used to occur on that stage.

David Wenham

#55. I think it is so much more fun to discover film in the movie theatre when there is so much anticipation about the movie.

Anne Hathaway

#56. I have a large personal collection of pictures. For every project, I choose images. Usually I don't do this until I've done an extensive script breakdown and distilled the text down to poetic form. I have to plant enough seeds so that there will be vibration.

Christine Jones

#57. I used to love stage above all, but that was when I was a single man. As I get older, the time commitment gets harder for theatre.

Seamus Dever

#58. Musical theatre is something that I always wanted to be a part of, and my first ever role on the West End as Joseph in 'Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat' gave me a taste for it.

Gareth Gates

#59. I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.

Dagmara Dominczyk

#60. The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Oscar Wilde

#61. I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) ... I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.

Noel Coward

#62. The theatre is not the place for the musician. When the curtain is up the music interrupts the actor, and when it is down the music interrupts the audience.

Sir Arthur Sullivan

#63. I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.

Antony Sher

#64. Even to an outsider like myself, not only in the theatre was such disunity evident, but in much else in government Spain. Alvarez del Vayo, Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, once asked, Why is it Spain's people are so great, but her leaders so small?

Langston Hughes

#65. 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

#66. In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.

Juliet Rylance

#67. The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.

Alan Bennett

#68. I did my New York debut at 21. It was 'On the Town' at the George Gershwin Theatre. New York is my artistic home.

Jesse Tyler Ferguson

#69. His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.
- ,

Anais Nin

#70. I never imagined I'd go into acting, but I always loved drama, and when I was 16, I discovered the Library Theatre up the road. So I plucked up courage and asked if I could watch rehearsals. It was like Heaven.

Lesley Nicol

#71. The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

Voltaire

#72. People who have never done theatre before, and have only worked in front of a camera, would find it very difficult, I think, to know how to command a stage and work with the logistics of being on stage. They're very different. The theatre is quite tricky, actually.

David Wenham

#73. One of the things I find very difficult about theatre is the repetition - that something can slide away from your original intentions.

Ben Whishaw

#74. The theatre and traveling through my modeling jobs, all of those experiences have helped a lot actually.

Alexis Bledel

#75. I'd auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and I didn't get a place and it was terrifying.

Matthew Macfadyen

#76. She understood about the comfort you can get from a small separate world, whether it's a theatre or a basketball team or the inside of a book.

Susan Cooper

#77. The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.

Anne Michaels

#78. You know that feeling when everyone around you is happy and you feel like you're standing back to watch them from afar? Like you're in this crappy little theatre all by yourself, watching the lives of other people who are totally fabulous? Yeah, that's me.

Jen Naumann

#79. At college, I felt frustrated thinking three years was a long time and I just wanted a job but afterwards I was in employment the whole time. I got into a theatre company and started doing stand-up gigs for cash, so I lived hand-to-mouth, but there was always enough to pay the bills.

Bill Bailey

#80. A creative and artistic home is what I've been looking for in the theatre.

Kenneth Branagh

#81. We are a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk.We are the original displaced personalities, concentrated gatherings of neurotics, egomaniacs, emotional misfits and precocious children.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#82. Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.

Jean Douchet

#83. I know what it's like to have a young child at the weekend and feel like there is nothing to see in the movie theatre. Family is so important.

Teri Hatcher

#84. I recall the night that President McKinley died. I was working at the time at a theatre in St. Louis. The oppressive feeling was in the air. I could not make the people laugh.

Al Jolson

#85. Even if the play is great, every day in theatre you have to question everything because the audience is new every day. I love that.

Clotilde Hesme

#86. In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.

Peter Brook

#87. There's all that brain work involved, remembering all those lines in a script. I find I have to eat a lot of fish, late - but not too late - in the afternoon. Doing theatre, you need to be like an athlete in training.

Jerry Hall

#88. What you find in the theatre is that if you're good, no matter what color you are, the audience will buy that - whoever you are.

James Avery

#89. The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.

Marina Abramovic

#90. Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history; it describes the theatre of events.

Jean Fernel

#91. I've always tried to not let movie, television or theatre be all that my life is about. I've always tried to get involved in the community or my family now I have kids.

David Morse

#92. I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.

Eugene Ionesco

#93. It's a whole different kind of anxiety. But the great thing about doing a theatre job is that once the ball starts rolling you just have to go with it, it's inexorable.

Emily Watson

#94. I think as a filmmaker my first contribution would just be to make a good movie that people would love to see and leave the theatre charged, with a sense of excitement.

Michael Moore

#95. Telly and films has been my thing, not necessarily by choice, and if the right piece of theatre came along, I would jump at it.

Darren Boyd

#96. I still feel I belong to the theatre. There is nothing more challenging and exciting for an actor than performing before a live audience. The stage is the real testing ground for an actor.

Anupam Kher

#97. I'm grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored - I've done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare.

Sheridan Smith

#98. The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.

Romain Rolland

#99. I love the instantaneous nature of filming rather than the repetition of working in the theatre, but that maybe because I haven't had great experiences working in the theatre.

Emilia Fox

#100. By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!

Alfred Enoch