Theatre Quotes

"If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence."

Shannon L. Alder

"Love is an operation theatre, where you find the scalpel and the stitches"

عبادة زياد الحمدان, سراج - عشيقة من سحر

"All the world's a stage."

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

"We are reaching levels of high experiential comfort and our standards will keep rising. We want to feel, we want to experience, we want to connect, we want intelligence, and we want to play; Ladies and Gentlemen: A new theatre is on its way."

Natasha Tsakos

"How will the performer-audience interaction change, now that we are so used to participating in the lives of strangers?"

Natasha Tsakos

"I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art."

Kamand Kojouri

"Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra."

Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

"What if Theater was the Pong of the the digital Ping?A place where the live experience has an function?"

Natasha Tsakos

"Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner."

E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

"That´s the problem with planning a late night supper after the opera, not only does the hero or the heroine die singing, but you end up famished after the last notes of the finale."

E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

"The Magician makes the visible, invisible.The Scientist makes the invisible, visible.The Artist stands in between, indivisible."

Natasha Tsakos

"Once and for allthe idea of glorious victorieswon by the glorious armymust be wiped outNeither side is gloriousOn either side they're just frightened men messing their pantsand they all want the same thingNot to lie under the earthbut to walk upon itwithout crutches(Roux, act 1, scene 19)"

Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

"These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye..."

Angela Carter

"Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection."

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

"Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and y"

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

"Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be."

Kamand Kojouri

"A red nose is the clown's mask and my moustache is mine."

Nuno Roque

"Theatre is a voyage into the archives of the human imagination"

Natasha Tsakos

"It’s no longer history in the making. It’s our story we are making."

Natasha Tsakos

"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."

Stephen Sondheim

"He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures:——but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm."

Eliza Parsons, Errors of Education

"Anna's voice wasn't a beautiful voice - rough edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy to it than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna's voice had the heat of the south; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were red with coals."

David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl

"There are those who dance the notes, and those who dance the music."

Eva Ibbotson, A Company of Swans

"What I want is irrelevant. This is your life, Faith."

Diane Samuels, Kindertransport: A Drama

"I feel as if I could be any thing or every thing, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh, or cut capers in any tragedy or comedy in the English language."

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

"You never get anywhere until you figure out the difference between passion and compassion."

Cynthia Heimel, A Girl's Guide to Chaos

"I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had."

Simona Panova, Nightmarish Sacrifice

"Without writers, stories would not be written,Without actors, stories could not be brought to life."

Angie-Marie Delsante

"The trick to loneliness is to spend a lot of time inside one’s head."

Pat R, O Pijama da Gata

"You'll never really be great unless you aim high."

Stella Adler, The Art of Acting

"Theatre is pure teleportation by means of suspension. It’s a voyage into the archives of the human imagination. A passport to all what ifs."

Natasha Tsakos

"Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising."

A.S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing

"To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination."

Simon Callow, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World

"As good surgical doctor works on a patient in the theater with varied kinds of surgical instruments, so a true leader also needs a clean bag of leadership characters that vary from task to task. One-way leaders are obvious failures!"

Israelmore Ayivor

"All life is theatre,' he said. 'We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves...."

Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree

"God is fucking stealing souls again!"

Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

"You have to understand your best. Your best isn't Barrymore's best or Olivier's best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier could stand on his head and still not be you. Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body. We don't need for you to imitate anybody, because that would be second best. And second best is no better than your worst."

Stella Adler, The Art of Acting

"The Director's Role: You are the obstetrician. You are not the parent of this child we call the play. You are present at its birth for clinical reasons, like a doctor or midwife. Your job most of the time is simply to do no harm.When something does go wrong, however, your awareness that something is awry--and your clinical intervention to correct it--can determine whether the child will thrive or suffer, live or die."

Frank Hauser, Notes on Directing

"When a show ends, for a few days, my body sizzles with leftover energy, like a tree in the wake of a lightning strike."

S.M. Stevens

"When you're in a show, all through rehearsals Tech Week hovers out there like a magical holy grail. In reality, Tech Week is always a train wreck of missed cues, forgotten lines, malfunctioning set pieces and short tempers."

S.M. Stevens

"The first few weeks of school were always surreal, like you landed on an alien planet with strange teachers and unfamiliar classrooms, even though the lockers and cafeteria seemed familiar."

S.M. Stevens, Bit Players, Has-Been Actors and Other Posers

"This was awkward to infinity. Alex living here would change my entire routine. I was sharing a bathroom with my boyfriend. How scary was that? I had tampons and pads and everything in there. He was going to be naked in the shower on the other side of my bedroom wall. And I was going to be naked in the shower with him in my house."

S.M. Stevens, Bit Players, Bird Girls and Fake Break-Ups

"A film that is a true work of art transcends theatre and heartwarmingly changes lives."

A.D. Posey

"I had loved poetry and the theatre. Now I loved adventure more."

Sara Sheridan, The Secret Mandarin

"The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe."

P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe

"So always avoid banality. That is, avoid illustrating the author's words and remarks. If you want to create a true masterpiece you must always avoid beautiful lies: the truths on the calender under each date you find a proverb or saying such as: "He who is good to others will be happy." But this is not true. It is a lie. The spectator, perhaps, is content. The spectator likes easy truths. But we are not there to please or pander to the spectator. We are here to tell the truth."

Jerzy Grotowski

"A man stroking a dog’s head means the universe is stroking the universe; a child playing with a little dog means the universe is playing with the universe! If the universe is a theatre play, then we can be sure that there is only one player: The universe itself! Everything we see is the same player!"

Mehmet Murat ildan

"Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

"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, boom

"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

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Theatre Quotes | QOTD