Theatre quotes
975 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke."
"Don't expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them."
"I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities."
"Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to."
"We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside theatre — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony--periods when the antithesis is in abeyance."
"To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater."
"I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone."
"Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good."
"Nobody "becomes" a character. You can't act unless you are who you are."
"Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them."
"It's not enough to have talent. You have to have a talent for your talent."
"The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting."
"I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act."
"Sin is what is new, strong, surprising, strange. The theatre must take an interest in sin if the young are to be able to go there."
"Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly."
"From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun."
"The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts."
"There may be a time when we'll attend Weather Theaters to recall the sensation of rain."
"Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff didn't like the word 'horror'. They, like I, went for the French description: 'the theatre of the fantastique'."
"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping."
"The world was no doubt made, that it might be a theatre of the divine glory."
"The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place."
"Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous."
"Music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it."
