Theatre quotes
975 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside theatre — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film."
"Pray to God and say the lines."
"Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they'll leave the theatre happy."
"The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form."
"We have assembled inside this ancient / and insane theatre / To propagate our lust for life / and flee the swarming wisdom / of the streets"
"Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case."
"Never meddle with play-actors, for they're a favoured race."
"Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself."
"I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms."
"January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead."
"Life in the theatre isn't necessarily when you get money from performing. It isn't when you sign a contract. It isn't even when you are in a play. It's when you understand it. If you understand it, you'll know why you want to act."
"From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex."
"In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear."
"History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background."
"We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved."
"Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness."
"I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone."
"An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham."
"In the theatre, words are eighty to eighty-five percent of the importance of what is happening to you for your comprehension. In film, words are about twenty percent. It's a different figure, but it's almost an opposite ratio. For the words are only a little bit of embroidery, a little bit of lacework."
"Whether you are a writer, or an actor, or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else."
