Theatre Quotes - Page 8

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.

It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.

I tell stories through dance, and I think that's why I'm so attracted to the theatre because even the choreography in theatre moves the plot forward at all times.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

I started in theatre. I was at Cleveland and I went to London for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.

Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

The world is a complicated place, and there's a lot of division between people. The performing arts tend to unify people in a way nothing else does.

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

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.

Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.

I went to Princeton High School, when I was very serious about being an artist. I was in a theatre family but I didn't want to become an actor.

We have assembled inside this ancient / and insane theatre / To propagate our lust for life / and flee the swarming wisdom / of the streets

In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.

The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.

I love the theatre and theatre people.

Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

What I’ve learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously.

I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.

The flood will lift the ghosts from the Hollywood lawn cemetery and they will disappear like ether in the now dead air. All the names will be erased from the billboards and the theatres and the piers and the magazines and the monuments. You live by myths of immortality, and your myths are not safe.

Acting is an everlasting search for truth.

I come from the theatre, my bones are in the theatre; it’s as natural as breathing to want to be in the theatre

In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.