Theater Quotes

“All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”
― Seán O'Casey

“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Man With Bags

“For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“The Play's the Thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“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

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”
― Oscar Wilde

“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, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“Important is not so much our place in the theater of the world but our acceptance in the theater of our inner self. ("Victory daze" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.”
― W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado

“How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience.”
― Shelley Winters

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“[Waiting for Godot] has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.”
― Vivian Mercier

“I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.”
― Edward Albee

“I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“If you are looking for something, don't go sit on the seashore and expect it to come and find you; you must search, search, search with all the stubbornness in you!”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, Building A Character

“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”
― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

“On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“Something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Then everyone leaves, and you are left, each night, to your own devices with a crowd of interesting people - most of whom you don't know - sitting in the dark.”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, Death Troupe

“The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.”
― Marsha Norman

“The plays should have the half-life of plutonium.”
― Suzan-Lori Parks

“It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings—the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.”
― Konstantin Stanislavski, Creating A Role

“Sin in the theater, I can observe now, is comparable to education in a university: it is there for those who wish to take advantage of it, but fewer do than you might suspect.”
― Billie Burke

“And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the summer and I hear the bees buzzing and for a moment I truly am Alice in Wonderland, do you have the heart to tell me I am not?”
― John Logan, Peter and Alice

“That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, Death Troupe