Theater Proverbs


Sayings about Theater

Those who have free tickets to the theater have the most criticism to make. ~ Chinese Proverb

I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more. ~ Marc Chagall

The most effective moments in the theatre are those that appeal to basic and commonplace emotions–love of woman, love of home, love of country, love of right, anger, jealousy, revenge, ambition, lust, and treachery. ~ Clayton Hamilton

The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts. ~ David Hare

Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. ~ Yasmina Reza

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. ~ George Santayana

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect. ~ Vaclav Havel

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. ~ Gore Vidal

From the start it has been the theatre’s business to entertain people … it needs no other passport than fun. ~ Bertolt Brecht

It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work — the night watchman. ~ Tallulah Bankhead

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes. ~ Iris Murdoch

Applause begets applause in the theatre, as laughter begets laughter and tears beget tears. ~ Clayton Hamilton

You need three things in the theater – the play, the actors and the audience, – and each must give something. ~ Kenneth Haigh

The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled. ~ Denis Diderot

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism. ~ Alan Jay Lerner

I think that’s just the dichotomy of the theater, who funds and who comes to watch. ~ Anna Deavere Smith

The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name. ~ Enid Bagnold

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

The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner. ~ Mary McCarthy

Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them. ~ Thornton Wilder

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

It isn’t a shortage of good scripts that ails the theater; it is a shortage of producers who know a good script when they see one. ~ George Jean Nathan

The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics. ~ Harold Clurman

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater. ~ Edward Albee

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. ~ Thornton Wilder

A theater requires two good producers: one to produce the play, and the other to produce the cash. ~ Evan Esar

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater. ~ Roman Polanski

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance. ~ Dario Fo

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything — gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness — rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre. ~ Antonin Artaud

I write plays for people who wouldn’t be seen dead in the theatre. ~ Barrie Keeffe

In the theater the audience wants to be surprised but by things that they expect. ~ Tristan Bernard

Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one. ~ Robert Brustein

Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good. ~ Terrence Mann

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

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. ~ Agnes De Mille

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself. ~ Bertolt Brecht

I have never regarded any theater as much more than the conclusion to a dinner or the prelude to a supper. ~ Max Beerbohm

The history of theatre is the history of first nights. ~ John Lahr

It is a hopeless Endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in. ~ Charles Dickens Quotes

The center of the stage is where I am. ~ Martha Graham

We live in what is, but we find 1,000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it. ~ Thornton Wilder

Broadway is a place where people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. ~ Sir Henry Wotton

One of the first and most important things for a critic to learn is how to sleep undetected at the theatre. ~ William Archer

The truth, the absolute truth, is that the chief beauty for the theatre consists in fine bodily proportions. ~ Sarah Bernhardt

The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one’s office for a job. ~ Tennessee Williams

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life. ~ Oscar Wilde

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life. ~ Arthur Miller

As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish. ~ George Bernard Shaw Quotes

There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre, that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people. ~ Romain Rolland

The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster. ~ Oscar Wilde Quotes

From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex. ~ Carl Jung

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances. ~ Victor Hugo Quotes

If you want to help the American theater, don’t be an actress, be an audience. ~ Tallulah Bankhead

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture. ~ Sir Laurence Olivier

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater. ~ W R Inge

Saying about Theater

I think the theatre is as essential to civilization as safe, pure water. ~ Vanessa Redgrave

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