What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop...
~ Sarah Ruhl
When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.
When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful.
Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
~ G.k. Chesterton
The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.
~ Stella Adler
The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.
That's something we all want to know, isn't it? Is there a purpose to our form and substance? Or are we simply the random result of billions of years of chemical reactions and accidents influenced by pressures from the environment?...-Jules, BOOM
~ Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
What are all the thoughts rattling in your mind when you're not listening to the answers to questions you ask? -Jo, Boom
When you step from the wings onto the stage you go from total blackness to a blinding hot glare. After a moment you adjust, but there is that moment. like being inside lightning.
~ Meg Howrey
I have Shakespeared my Moliere to Tenessee, and I am Wild for Becket! But I got a little tired of the redundancy.
~ Natasha Tsakos
If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.
~ Catherine Tate
If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.
~ William Shakespeare
A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.
~ Harold Bloom
We number nothing that we spend for you;Our duty is so rich, so infinite,That we may do it still without accompt.Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,That we, like savages, may worship it.
Backstage was chaos distilled into a very small space.
~ William Alexander
It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs.
~ Roman Payne
Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history, it describes the theatre of events.
~ Jean Fernel
Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.
~ Leslie Jamison
In any case, the goal is the same: to connect.
~ Nicolas Billon
people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.
~ Charles Bukowski
[Cinema]… obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.
~ Hugo Munsterberg
A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.
~ Kenneth Tynan
A walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
~ Paul Newman
An actor is a guy who if you ain't talking about him ain't listening.
~ George Glass
An agent is a guy who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what he makes.
~ Alva Johnston
Bugs Bunny - the perfect employee. Never absent. Never late. Never changes the script. Doesn't have an agent. Never asks for a percent of the profit. Doesn't ask to have his relatives on the payroll.
~ Anonymous
In music the punctuation is absolutely strict the bars and the rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.
~ Ralph Richardson
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does straight to our emotions deep into the twilight room of the soul.
~ Ingmar Bergman
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
~ Clive James
The best audience is intelligent well-educated and a little drunk.
~ Alvin Barkley
The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.
~ Oscar Wilde
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.
~ Arthur Miller
When the characters are really alive before their author the latter does nothing but follow them in their action in their words in the situations which they suggest to him.
~ Luigi Pirandello
Working in the theatre has a lot in common with unemployment.
~ Arthur Gingold
There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.
~ Peggy Ashcroft
Acting is not being emotional but being able to express emotion.
~ Kate Reid
A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.
~ Jean Anouilh
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
~ Orson Welles
Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
~ William Hazlitt
