Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Theater.
Good drama must be drastic.
Friedrich Von Schlegel
All this class of pleasures inspires me with the same nausea as I feel at the sight of rich plum-cake or sweetmeats; I prefer the driest bread of common life.
Sydney Smith
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
It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.
William Prynne
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
Thornton Wilder
The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.
Denis Diderot
Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
Sir John Mortimer
I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
William Shakespeare
The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
Alfred Jarry
The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.
No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.
Kenneth Tynan, Recalled on his d
I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.
Orson Welles
We live in what is, but we find 1,000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: Behold! These things are. Yet most dramatists employ it to say: This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.
Reviewers...must normally function as huff-and-puff artists blowing laggard theatergoers stageward.
Walter Kerr, Statement quoted in
The world's a theatre, the earth a stage,Which God and nature do with actors fill
John Heywood
For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
Sarah Bernhardt, Memories of My
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.
Enid Bagnold, Autobiography, ch.
