Theatre Quotes

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.

George Santayana

To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.

Eleanor Duse

This...is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

Idealistic producing is safe. Sensibly projected in the theater, the fine thing always does pay and always will.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

In the theater the audience wants to be surprised but by things that they expect.

Tristan Bernard

Applause begets applause in the theatre, as laughter begets laughter and tears beget tears.

CLAYTON HAMILTON

Two strongly influential movements--naturalism and absurdism--have polarized western theatre, arguing respectively for a tidy global perspective of human behavior or for an idiosyncratic local vision, in which ultimately no human behavioral patterns can be abstracted. One is left to choose between existence represented as strict linear determinism or as utter randomness.

WILLIAM DEMASTES

Theatre is not and should not be a literary form of expression. A theatrical celebration can take place anywhere: out of doors, in a garage, in a stable. The problem with avant-garde theatre today is that it is absolutely intellectual. You have to be cerebrally inclined to understand what is going on.

JEROME SAVARY

The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.

Sarah Bernhardt

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

Stella Adler

The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel's.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.

ARTHUR MILLER

From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun.

BERTOLT BRECHT

The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout.

Robert Holman

There are two impulses in theatre: to be frivolous or to make rules.

Tadashi Suzuki