Verbatim Theatre Quotes

#1. Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case. #Quote by John Cage

#2. A chief cause of unhappiness is what I call mental movies. Mental movies are a misuse of the imagination. You know how it goes. You have a painful experience with someone, then run it over and over in your mind. You visualize what you said, what he did, how you both felt. As awful as it is, you feel compelled to repeat the film day and night. It is as if you were locked inside a theatre playing a horrible movie. #Quote by Vernon Howard

#3. I went to an Arts High School, so everyone there was kind of anti-clique, though they still happened. I guess I was in the theatre-dork clique. Not to be confused with the musical-theatre-dork clique. #Quote by Finn Wittrock

#4. I find the theatre faintly embarrassing for the actors performing on stage. It seems rather showy-off in an undignified way. #Quote by Charles Saatchi

#5. In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called 'White Feathers.' It was produced in the studio theatre at the students' union in early 1999, when I was 21. It's 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War. #Quote by Laura Wade

#6. I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. #Quote by Peter Brook

#7. You will permit me to say, that a greater drama is now acting on this theatre than has heretofore been brought on the American tage, or any other in the world. We exhibit at present the novel and astonishing spectacle of a whole people deliberating calmly on what form of government will be most conducive to their happiness; and deciding with an unexpected degree of unanimity in favour of a system which they conceive calculated to answer the purpose. #Quote by George Washington

#8. The frivolity with which all theatrical activity is conducted has one consoling feature-there are no rules of behavior that apply regularly to any part of the theatre. #Quote by Moss Hart

#9. This feeling of power, it's happiness to sit in a cottage by the Danube among six women who think I'm semi-idiot, and to know that in Paris, the headquarters of intelligence, 500 people are sitting dead-quiet in the auditorium and are foolish enough to expose their brains to my powers of suggestion. Some revolt! But many will go away with my spores in their gray matter. They will go home pregnant with the seed of my soul, and they will breed my brood. #Quote by August Strindberg

#10. As for theatre, there's ups and downs to everything. Theatre is ephemeral. But that is part of its charm because you can always say the production was better than it was. #Quote by Clive Barker

#11. According to his diary he worked hard and without scruple to discover what he could on his own. Of course, in principle I have no objection to using human subjects, as long as they are already dead," she adds. "Have you heard of the anatomy theatre? It is where the medical school's dissections are performed. They use bears, monkeys, dogs, and human corpses too, when the weather is cool enough. The students have been known to kidnap a body the night before its dissection, dress it up, and take it for a gondola ride down the canal. #Quote by Maryrose Wood

#12. Look! when I am in a drawing room, a church, a station; on the terrasse of a cafe, at the theatre or wherever crowds pass or loiter, I enjoy considering faces from a strictly homicidal point of view. For you may see by the glance, by the back of the neck, the shape of the skull, the jaw bone and zygoma of the cheeks, or by some part of their persons that they bear the stigmata of that psychological calamity known as murder. It is scarcely an aberration of my mind, but I can go nowhere without seeing it flickering beneath eyelids, or without feeling its mysterious contact in the touch of every hand held out to me. Last Sunday I went to a town on the festival day of its patron saint. In the public square, which was decorated with foliage, floral arches, and poles draped with flags, was grouped every kind of amusement common to that sort of public celebration - And beneath the paternal eye of the authorities, a swarm of good people were enjoying themselves. The wooden horses, the roller-coaster and the swings drew a very meagre crowd. The organs wheezed their gayest tunes and most bewitching overtures in vain. Other pleasures absorbed this festive throng. Some shot with rifles, pistols, or the good old crossbow at targets painted like human faces; others hurled balls, knocking over marionettes ranged pathetically on wooden bars. Still others, mallet in hand, pounded upon a spring which animated a French sailor who patriotically transfixed with his bayonet a poor hova or a mockin #Quote by Octave Mirbeau

#13. That's where the theatre of dreams is, over in L.A.; it's the land of opportunity for actors, and to go over there with a good team behind you and have a part you want to audition for really makes it a joy. #Quote by Luke Pasqualino

#14. The Arts are the only acceptable theatre of war for peace. #Quote by Bryant McGill

#15. We know the Arts are the archives of our human history, the wind of invention and the heartbeat of humanity #Quote by Natasha Tsakos

#16. Growing up in Malaysia and England, there wasn't an obvious route into the comics world, so my creative energy went into theatre and prose and then movies and TV. #Quote by Arvind Ethan David

#17. T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress. #Quote by Banksy

#18. The first time my mum and dad went to the theatre was at my drama school in third year. #Quote by Amanda Hale

#19. Being a film actor is very different from a theatre actor. #Quote by Catherine Deneuve

#20. Without a past, future, or name who are you? Nobody? Without a past, future, or name do you have a problem? #Quote by Bert McCoy

#21. I took theatre and stuff in college, then I took a bunch of different acting classes here in L.A. Sometimes when I have a hard audition, I'll call my acting coach and he'll come help me. I actually get more nervous in acting class than I do at an actual audition. It's actually a really great way to get over your nerves. #Quote by Melissa Ordway

#22. Every generous action loves the public view; yet no theatre for virtue is equal to a consciousness of it. #Quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero

#23. When I was eight, I bought my first puppet. It was a monkey, and I paid five cents for it. I collected some scrap wood and built myself a puppet theatre. I made 32 cents with my first show, which I thought was pretty good, and that's when I knew I would be a puppeteer when I grew up. #Quote by Caroll Spinney

#24. Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler - I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre, you get them one of her books. #Quote by Harvey Keitel

#25. But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don't have to be very smart. #Quote by Beth Henley

#26. A statement of vision is the overarching purpose, the big dream, the visionary concept-something presently out of reach-so stated that it excites the imagination and chlalenges people to work for something they do not yet know how to do. #Quote by Robert K. Greenleaf

#27. For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time. #Quote by Patrick Stewart

#28. Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. #Quote by Walter Benjamin

#29. Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears [ ... ] #Quote by Edgar Allan Poe

#30. Ummiye is currently working on a screenplay called "Footless on Her Own Feet." It tells the story of a handicapped girl whose fifty-year-old mother pushes her to school every day in a wheelbarrow. Eventually, she wins a national drawing contest, making a super-realistic picture of herself in the wheelbarrow. With the prize money, she buys a wheelchair. Like the Arslankoy theatre, the girl's drawing uses artistic representation to change the thing represented. By drawing a truthful picture of the humiliating wheelbarrow, she transforms it into a dignified wheelchair-- much as a theatre, by representing the injustice of village women's life, might make that life more just. Nabokov once claimed that the inspiration for Lolita was an art work produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes: a drawing of the bars of its cage. It's a good metaphor for artistic production. What else do we ever draw besides the bars of our cage, or the wheelbarrow we rode in as crippled children? How else do cages get smashed? How else will we stand on our own feet? #Quote by Elif Batuman

#31. God is fucking stealing souls again! #Quote by Stephen Adly Guirgis

#32. In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come - he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon - or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film - it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you've fallen asleep or, because you can't wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you've left it and never goes on without you. #Quote by John M. Keller

#33. She saw beauty in ordinary little things and took pleasure in it (and this was just as well because she had had very little pleasure in her life). She took pleasure in a well-made cake, a smoothly ironed napkin, a pretty blouse, laundered and pressed; she liked to see the garden well dug, the rich soil brown and gravid; she loved her flowers. When you are young you are too busy with yourself... you haven't time for ordinary little things but, when you leave youth behind, your eyes open and you see magic and mystery all around you: magic in the flight of a bird, the shape of a leaf, the bold arch of a bridge against the sky, footsteps at night and a voice calling in the darkness, the moment in a theatre before the curtain rises, the wind in the trees, or (in winter) an apple-branch clothed with pure white snow and icicles hanging from from a stone and sparkling with rainbow colours. #Quote by D.E. Stevenson

#34. I am a critic - as essential to the theatre as ants to a picnic. #Quote by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#35. I've been doing theatre since I was 5 years old. #Quote by Claudia Christian

#36. Theatre is about people, not buildings. Incalculable damage has been done to the expert talent a company needs - from wardrobe to lighting technicians. #Quote by Edward Hall

#37. I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays. #Quote by Beth Henley

#38. I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there's a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre. #Quote by Susan Hill

#39. I think some of my best theatre training has been in the Marine Corps. Not only meeting a bunch of characters, but growing up. You're in really adult situations at a young age, as far as being in charge of people. #Quote by Adam Driver

#40. From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun. #Quote by Bertolt Brecht

#41. I've always loved musical theatre. I've always been a big kind of closeted musical theatre nerd. I really have always dreamed about being able to do musical theatre. #Quote by John Gallagher, Jr.

#42. People ask me if I ever feel outside the Hollywood loop, and I never do, because both of us do a lot of theatre, so it's great for New York and it's also half-way between Europe and the west coast, so it's the best of both worlds. #Quote by Liam Neeson

#43. I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one! #Quote by Martin McDonagh

#44. The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music
its special noise
is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know. #Quote by Edward Albee

#45. I trained in the theatre. #Quote by Danny Boyle

#46. No plasticity exists in the Quran. This book is believed by Muslims to be the verbatim words of God. How can you change the word of God? Other religions are living. They are changing and evolving. Islam is fossilized. It allows no change. It can't be reformed. #Quote by Ali Sina