Quotes about Theater

“Good drama must be drastic.”

“I just love, I love, I love movies.”

“I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.”

“Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one.”

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

“Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.”

“I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre.”

“In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.”

“The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.”

“The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.”

“The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.”

“I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.”

“The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.”

“A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.”

“Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising.”

“The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.”

“The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.”

“It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman.”

“My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive.”

“In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.”

“The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.”

“Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite right. They will be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.''”

“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.”

“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.”

“A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.”

“If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.”

“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.”