Theater quotes

Page 1

◆ That awkward moment when you finish a medium popcorn by the opening credits at the movie theater.

- 100

◆ Whoever becomes the head of the National Theater finds himself in a position like that of Nelson's Column-pigeons dump on you because you're there.

- Peter Hall99

◆ You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you. The more you pull away from the public, the less power you have on screen.

- Ben Kingsley99

◆ You need three things in the theater - the play, the actors and the audience, - and each must give something

- Kenneth Haigh99

◆ Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

- W R Inge99

◆ The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

- Arthur Miller99

◆ The center of the stage is where I am.

- Martha Graham99

◆ All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man

- Bernard Berenson99

◆ In the theater the audience wants to be surprised but by things that they expect

- Tristan Bernard99

◆ No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

- Kenneth Tynan99

◆ The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

- Arthur Miller99

◆ I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.

- Marc Chagall99

◆ It was an accident, although Ive been involved in some kind of theatrical function or other since I was a child in school, music, athletics. To me, acting is the most logical way for peoples neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves. To my way of thinking, an actors course is set even before hes out of the cradle.

- James Dean99

◆ The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

- Gore Vidal99

◆ I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

- Laurence Olivier Sir99