Kabuki Theatre Quotes

#1. Theatre was my first love. I can't take the theatre out of me. And I wouldn't want to. To me, it's home. #Quote by Jim Parsons

#2. 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. #Quote by Helen McCrory

#3. I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft. #Quote by David Ives

#4. Acting was merely a pastime; I wanted to make films. But theatre, ah - now that was a labour of love. Can there be anything better than performing without retakes and cuts, in front of people you can see, hearing them breathe in the darkness of the hall? #Quote by Kabir Bedi

#5. [Luchino] Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe's oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that's the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.

(...)

He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that's too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history. #Quote by Martin Scorsese

#6. All writing is rubbish.
People who try to free themselves from what is vague in order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are producing rubbish.
The whole literary tribe is a pack of rubbish mongers, especially today.
All those who have landmarks in their minds, I mean in a certain part of their heads, in well-defined sites in their skulls, all those who are masters of language, all those for whom words have meaning, all those for whom the soul has its heights and thought its currents, those who are the spirits of the times, and who have given names to these currents of thought - I am thinking of their specific tasks, and of that mechanical creaking their minds produce at every gust of wind - are rubbish mongers. #Quote by Antonin Artaud

#7. If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture. #Quote by Edith Wharton

#8. Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors. #Quote by Constantin Stanislavski

#9. I was used to theatre classes. I studied with my mother; she was a theatre teacher and directed, too, so it was very family-like. Then I studied with a great teacher in Paris, and she was wonderful; she pushed me, but she was a warm soul. #Quote by Juliette Binoche

#10. What is a woman's life? Do not think, because she is not a man, she does not fight. The bedchamber is her tilting ground, where she shows her colours, and her theatre of war is the sealed room where she gives birth. #Quote by Hilary Mantel

#11. The closer they come to transcending technique and the memorization of lines
the closer to really beginning to act, in short
the more Chinese they begin to seem. Happy now approaches Miss Forsythe to pick her up in the restaurant with a wonderful formality, his back straight, head high, his hand-gestures even more precise and formal, but with a comic undertone that ironically comes closer to conveying the original American idea of the scene than when he was trying to be physically sloppy and "relaxed"
that is, imitating an American. I think that by some unplanned magic we may end up creating something not quite American or Chinese but a pure style springing from the heart of the play itself
the play as a nonnational event, that is, a human circumstance. #Quote by Arthur Miller

#12. Mirabelle knows, and she lets this be unspoken, that all free things require conversation. Sitting in a darkened movie theatre requires absolutely no conversation at all, whereas a free date, like a walk down Hollywood Boulevard in the busy evening, requires comments, chatter, observations, and with luck, wit. She worries that since they have only exchanged perhaps two dozen words between them, these free dates will be horrible. #Quote by Steve Martin

#13. My interest in theatre started in high school, mostly because my dean forced me to do it. I was creating trouble in the hallways, so he demanded that I do something with my spare time. #Quote by Michael Weston

#14. When actors go onstage, you know immediately if they can do their job. You can be a lawyer or an accountant for years and not find out. #Quote by Patsy Rodenburg

#15. The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage. #Quote by Andrzej Wajda

#16. But then I got a job selling coffee at the York Theatre, and when I met theatre people, something clicked. I felt comfortable with them; I felt like myself. I decided to go to drama school based just on that feeling. I had never done any acting. #Quote by Janet McTeer

#17. 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. #Quote by Jim Dale

#18. In comedy you feel you need to go back to the theatre every now and again, you feel you need to go back to an audience every now and again to see if you're still getting your craft right, making people laugh at the moments you think they should and that sort of thing. #Quote by Mathew Baynton

#19. 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. #Quote by Laura Wade

#20. I've always thought about the theatre like a Christmas tree, all shining and bright with beautiful ornaments. But now it seems like a Christmas tree with the tinsel all tarnished and the colored balls all fallen off and broken ... '
Sure, I know what you mean ... And it's both ways ... Some of the ornaments fall and break and some stay clear and bright. Some of the tinsel gets tarnished and some stays shining and beautiful like the night before Christmas. Nothing's ever all one way. You know that. It's all mixed up and you've just got to find the part that's right for you.'
- Elizabeth and Ben #Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

#21. When I was a junior in college I moved to New York and went to this performance school the Experimental Theatre Wing. We had singing class and again, some of the other students would cry when I was singing, and I really didn't know why. I started to realize that there was something in the tone of my voice that was evocative for them. #Quote by Antony Hegarty

#22. I honed my passion for acting in theatre and education, and I think it's important not to belittle the child audience. #Quote by Rhys Ifans

#23. It's quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century ... He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule and the world as a theatre of the absurd. #Quote by Grant Morrison

#24. I hadn't studied theatre and I hadn't studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and what the final product would be like, but luckily I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get them, who would get themselves to the place where a good director should get them to build characters. #Quote by Rob Urbinati

#25. 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. #Quote by Anupam Kher

#26. Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity. #Quote by Tiziano Terzani

#27. A career in the theatre demands so much commitment. #Quote by Jim Dale

#28. Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? #Quote by Arundhati Roy

#29. What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? #Quote by William Shakespeare

#30. I came up in comics doing lots of DIY self-published stuff, producing my own books, handling all the details of creation and production. And theatre is something that's really attractive to me, as it's a similarly accessible form - it has a lot of the same sort of down-and dirty DIY spirit, where you can make a lot with a little. #Quote by Fred Van Lente

#31. Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in. #Quote by Stephen Sondheim

#32. I don't approve of censorship. I like the French theatre idea. Put on the play, and if the audience doesn't care for it, or feels offended by it, they rip up the seats. #Quote by John Huston

#33. Modelling was not very satisfying for me. I came to London to model, and I fell in love with the theatre. I was eating yoghurt every day so that I had the money to go to the theatre. I saw everything. It's still my dream to be on stage in London. #Quote by Caterina Murino

#34. I had great faith in Irish actors, that they'd be hip to the whole theatre thing, and they are. I had no illusions of coming over here as some kind of big shot. It's been a learning experience for me too. #Quote by Christopher Meloni

#35. The theatre is a world in itself. The possibility for creating experiences that move people is increased many times over. In the end, the best stories are usually about a battle of good over evil - that has never changed. #Quote by Cat Stevens

#36. I sometimes think the theatre is more demanding because it requires things you don't have in films, like it requires you to make the people in the front row believe you and not look an idiot to them while the people right at the back can hear you. #Quote by Michael Gambon

#37. I dig into my Chinese food with my fork, pretending not to listen – but if I were a GIF, I'd be the Michael Jackson eating popcorn in a movie theatre one, so engrossed am I. #Quote by Sara Ney

#38. Acting must be scaled down for the screen. A drawing room is a lot smaller than a theatre auditorium. #Quote by Arthur Lowe

#39. In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall - that when the play is finished, it's done - but now I realise it's more like gardening; you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You're part of a thing that's living. #Quote by Lee Hall

#40. I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience. #Quote by Simon McBurney

#41. When I look around at Broadway and the West End, theatre is becoming an exclusive club. #Quote by Kevin Spacey

#42. What cities, as great as this, have ... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others ... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins. #Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

#43. Starting my career in London was no accident because the city and the industry here are all about theatre and drama, and I respond well to that. #Quote by Erin O'Connor

#44. Any play I do, anything I do in the theatre, it's absolutely essential for me in a sense, to create a family, to put a group of people together who love to share together what they're doing, rather than be individuals. #Quote by George Ogilvie