Entertainment Quotes

I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism.

Toba Beta

You are my life now.

Stephenie Meyer

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure

Francis Bacon

The Miss America contest is the most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.

Gerald Early

Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while he was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the horned toad and the red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cunt-like cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy center of Manhattan Island.

Henry Miller

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

Arthur Miller

The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-colored bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.

Sean O'Casey

Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course.

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

Orson Welles

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.

Erica Jong

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

John Berger

Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse.

Anita Loos

We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.

James Thurber

The reason I'm in this business, I assume all performers are -- it's Look at me, Ma! It's acceptance, you know -- Look at me, Ma, look at me, Ma, look at me, Ma. And if your mother watches, you'll show off till you're exhausted; but if your mother goes, Ptshew!

Lenny Bruce

Americans don't spend billions for entertainment. They spend it in search of entertainment.

Source Unknown

[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Jane Austen

The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.

Lester Bangs

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

Kin Hubbard

Show business is really 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent being able to handle it when it gets offered to you.

Tommy Steele