Quotes & Sayings About Life Theatre

The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage. — Andrzej Wajda

That is why it has been repeatedly noticed that the human life is a theatre where the mask show takes place, and we are merely the actors of that show, having entirely identified ourselves with the masks and fooling not only others, but first of all ourselves. — Arvydas Sliogeris

I think a person has to believe in something,
or search out some kind of faith;
otherwise life is empty, nothing.
How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,
why children are born, why there are stars in the sky ...
Either you know why you live,
or it's all small, unnecessary bits. — Sarah Ruhl

I was never the class clown or anything like that. When I was growing up and doing theatre in Seattle I was always doing very dramatic work. Now I can't get a dramatic role to save my life! — Anna Faris

I think I've had an interesting life. I've done films, TV, theatre and got married. I don't have any regrets. — Kabir Bedi

I've always tried to not let movie, television or theatre be all that my life is about. I've always tried to get involved in the community or my family now I have kids. — David Morse

Ten times a day I am compelled to reflect on my past life ... and I can never justify to myself the spending of four years on dramatic criticism. I have sworn an oath to endure no more of it. Never again will I cross the threshold of a theatre. The subject is exhausted; and so am I.
I am off duty forever, and am going to sleep. — George Bernard Shaw

I can't remember a single year of my life when I haven't made a piece of theatre. — Simon McBurney

We cannot understand the Higher Wisdom. Later, well after the event, we may see the lesson contained in the event, and be truly grateful. We must, however, submit to what happens, accepting all that unfolds gracefully. This is the key. All your tragedies in life and in the theatre come about because of non-acceptance of the will of the Gods. Not my petty little ant-like will, but the Gods omnipotent will, let that will be done, I say. This is the beginning and end of the virtuous life. — Alan Jacobs

Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel.
A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him. — Gustave Flaubert

They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl's heart. — W.B.Yeats

You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film - you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up. — Daniel Day-Lewis

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. This is the century that has shaped all the conquering arms against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theatre, Painting, Architecture, Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Science, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical appetites, intellectual and even moral refinement of all pleasures, all the elegance and all the pleasures. The existence was so well filled that if the seventeenth century was the Great Age of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion. — Charles Maurice De Talleyrand-Perigord

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway- its true religion? Wasn't the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons- but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it. That summer, the one you'll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images ... flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that become our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion? — Jess Walter

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight. — Robertson Davies

If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul. — William Shakespeare

You never get anywhere until you figure out the difference between passion and compassion. — Cynthia Heimel

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life. — David McCullough

When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries. — Andrew O'Hagan

There are all sorts of reasons why I don't do much work in the theatre, the main one being that after two performances I feel I've given all I can. I hate repetition, I really do. It's like asking a painter to paint he same picture every day of his life. — Peter Cushing

I'm really keen to go back and do some theatre, but I can't afford to at the moment because we're getting married in September. And then I'm hoping to direct a film at the end of this year, and that means a year of your life without pay. — Richard Roxburgh

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing - all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art - at the door. — Constantin Stanislavski

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

When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not. — Jeanette Winterson

I think the people who probably have it the best are the people on cable like on 'Entourage', 'the Sopranos', etc. who have 13 episodes per season and breaks to do films and theatre. I think that's the most ideal life. — T. J. Thyne

Each of us is in the world for no very long time, and within the few years of his life has to acquire whatever he is to know of this strange planet and its place in the universe. To ignore our opportunities for knowledge, imperfect as they are, is like going to the theatre and not listening to the play. The world is full of things that are tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or surprising, and those who fail to be interested in the spectacle that it offers are forgoing one of the privileges that life has to offer. — Bertrand Russell

This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries. — Robertson Davies

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My family were broadminded enough to support me when I wanted to pursue a life in the theatre. — Peter Gallagher

Now I'm seen by more people in one episode than I was in 20 years of theatre and movies. It's gratifying to have an impact on 25 million people a night, but I can say goodbye to my lunch-pail life as a working actor. I'm scared I might be a celebrity. — William Petersen

The only way that you can keep moving forward, finding other ways of expressing things about this increasingly complicated world that we live in, is by listening and observing not only to life around you but to the other people who are in the room. It's not about a sort of, you know, a sense that you have to be democratic about these things, it's a question of creativity that the process of making theatre is a collaborative process, and it is not in, it is not a question of, you know, I have no interest in paying lip service to it, for me it's absolutely fundamental. — Simon McBurney

All life is theatre,' he said. 'We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves ... — Susan Cooper

Directing Skyfall was one of the best experiences of my professional life, but I have theatre and other commitments, including productions of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and King Lear, that need my complete focus over the next year and beyond. — Sam Mendes

You must realise now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve Him in and from the ordinary, secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fileds, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. — Josemaria Escriva

Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine. — Brooks Atkinson

Improv Everywhere tramples the lines drawn between spectacle and spectator, theatre and real life, public and private, performance and protest, and reclaims the streets for ordinary people. — Lyn Gardner

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way. — Iris Murdoch

Pass the popcorn, please. Life is a film, theatre, a theatre of the soul. We play different roles on different stages. At death, we walk offstage. At birth, we walk onstage. — Frederick Lenz

My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened. — Lin-Manuel Miranda

I spent a month in India and where I learnt an important word for me, for everything that had come before and after, and the was the word 'seva' - the work you do without wanting reward, simply for the work itself, for the spiritual, for the practice and the experience it gives you by doing that work. I began to realise it was something I was searching for all my life, that I was doing theatre not for myself but for something for a search, for a seeking for something that is behind that, to find a truth somewhere about us. — George Ogilvie

11 All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theatre. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love, principally when it is represented as very chaste and virtuous. For the more innocent it appears to innocent souls, the more they are likely to be touched by it. — Blaise Pascal

I have an Honors Degree in Drama from the University of Alberta, but when it was done I knew a life in modern theatre was not for me. While figuring out what the hell I might do instead of theatre, I spent a couple of days on a horror film doing stunt work. I'd never been behind the camera before, and I loved everything about it. I joined the local film co-op - The Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta - because you could trade skills for experience. These indie filmmakers were making their own stuff their own way, all the time. Instant education. — Karen Walton

He stared to sea. I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover - that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it. — John Fowles

The purpose of theatre is ... making an event in which a group of fragments are sudde nly brought together ... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up ... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life ... The marvel of being one. — Peter Brook

Is that what we come into the world for, to hurry to an office, and work hour after hour till night, then hurry home and dine and go to a theatre? Is that how I must spend my youth? Youth lasts so short a time, Bateman. And when I am old, what have I to look forward to? To hurry from my home in the morning to my office and work hour after hour after hour till night, and then hurry home again, and dine and go to a theatre? That may be worthwhile if you make a fortune; I don't know, it depends on your nature; but if you don't, is it worth while then? I want to make more out of my life than that, Bateman. — W. Somerset Maugham

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers. — G.K. Chesterton

The theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane. — Anton Chekhov

Theatre has been a part of my life since before I can remember - my dad is also an actor and a director and a storyteller who lives and works in the Twin Cities; my mom is a nurse practitioner, but she also grew up doing theatre - so, it has always been a part of my experience. — Seth Numrich

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated. — H.L. Mencken

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'
Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn") — Cornell Woolrich

We have assembled inside this ancient / and insane theatre / To propagate our lust for life / and flee the swarming wisdom / of the streets — Jim Morrison

Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric - strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her - a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of her youth. — Henry James

Cinema and, most of all, films have changed my life much more than theatre or television. And that is the reason why I'm an actress. — Julie Gayet

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable. — Stella Adler

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

It's quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century ... He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule and the world as a theatre of the absurd. — Grant Morrison

Right before I graduated from the national theatre school, I got the part of Roxie Hart in 'Chicago' in Copenhagen. That led to me playing it here in London. I was 26 when I came over for that. It was the first thing I did as a professional, and it is still the experience of my life. — Birgitte Hjort Sorensen

A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them ... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older. — Oscar Wilde

I would like to reconcile the church and the circus. I wanted to transform the theatre ... to get my message across that there is only one God - the living man - the person sitting next to you. That is my religion. I believe that there is a sense to life. — Oleg Kulik

The dogged effort to "denaturalize" gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of "real" politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. — Judith Butler

I found him perhaps the least terrifying man I've ever met in the theater - because at first glance I could see through him and he could see through me, and he knew that I knew that he knew. Look, love, I've been bullied all my life by bigger experts than Larry Olivier, I can assure you, and he's just got to get in line. — Peter O'Toole

From the perspective of the radicals, the habitus basis of human existence is, as a whole, no more than a spiritually worthless puppet theatre into which a free ego-soul must be implanted after the fact, and through the greatest effort. If this fails, one experiences an effect in most people that is familiar from many athletes and models: they make a promising visual impression - but if one knocks, no one is at home. According to these doctrines, the adept can only rid themselves of their baggage by subjecting their life to a rigorous practice regime by which they can de-automize their behaviour in all important dimensions. At the same time, they must re-automatize their newly acquired behaviour so that what they want to be or represent becomes second nature. — Peter Sloterdijk

I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo. — William Shakespeare

I've been acting my whole life. I have this huge imagination! I'm a dancer and my mom's a dance teacher, and I was always performing and entertaining people. I'd go to see live theatre or a movie, and I'd become the main character for a few days afterwards. I loved being somebody new for a temporary amount of time. — Natasha Calis

Maybe the theatre isn't any place for a reasonable human being after all. It keeps your emotions in such a constant state of upheaval. It's really terribly wearing. I wonder if I could stand it, one emotional upset after the other just going on and on for the rest of my life. — Madeleine L'Engle

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.'
'You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.'
'Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?'
'Before either.'
'I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,' said the lad.
'Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?'
'I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.'
'Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.'
'I should like that awfully.'
The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. 'I shall stay with the real Dorian,' he said, sadly. — Oscar Wilde

I long for the simplicity of theatre. I want lessons learned, comeuppances delivered, people sorted out, all before your bladder gets distractingly full. That's what I want. What I know is what we all know, whether we'll admit it or not: every attempt to impose the roundness of a well-made play on reality produces a disaster. Life just isn't so, nor will it be made so. — John M. Ford

The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. [ ... ] If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness. — Antonin Artaud

Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life. (Address to Congress on Resigning Commission Dec 23, 1783) — George Washington

So many things that are so dramatic or exciting when you read about them actually happen so simply and quietly. We humans like to consider ourselves important to creation and to the world, and we expect that whenever death comes it should be with a crash of thunder and wild shouts or something, or with soft music around and people looking grave and serious. We always have it that way in the theatre because it makes us believe in our importance. Most of our life is a matter of dressing ourselves up to believe in just that, dressing ourselves in attractive clothes, in titles, in reputations. Actually, at base we all realize that we're just a frightened bundle of animals, still afraid of the unknown, and still afraid of thousands of things that can separate us from life, and trying to shield ourselves from our own smallness. — Louis L'Amour

I was called to audition for a play when I was very young, following which I continued to act as well as write and direct. When I moved to Delhi and joined Hindu College, theatre became a very big part of my life. — Imtiaz Ali

Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them. — Antonin Artaud

His only theatre is the free show that god provides, the sky and the stars, flowers and children, mankind who's sufferings he shares and the created world in which he is trying his wings — Victor Hugo

I am not a complete idiot, but whether from weakness or laziness have no talent for thinking. I know only how to reflect: I am a mirror ... Logic does not exist for me. I float on the waves of art and life and never really know how to distinguish what belongs to the one or the other or what is common to both. Life unfolds for me like a theatre presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart. — Sviatoslav Richter

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. — Stella Adler

I've never been one for late nights, which is why I have always preferred making films to theatre. A play takes over your life: you start to feel sick at lunchtime, and by mid-afternoon, you're wishing for a bomb scare so the whole thing will be called off. Of course, if the evening goes well and you get the applause, then it's wonderful. — Charles Dance

I sometimes feel that I am trying to dig in the world around me. I'm involved in another kind of archaeology to look for another kind of truth, and the moment I find, the moment I am separated from that life, the moment I am sort of in a world, every time I have gone out and performed in the, in the cinema for example, if you do two or three films on the trot you suddenly have this impression that you're becoming separate or separated from the world around you. — Simon McBurney

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Theatre remains the only thing I understand. It is in the community of theatre that I have my being. In spite of jealousies and fears, emotional conflicts and human tensions; in spite of the penalty of success and the dread of failure; in spite of tears and feverish gaiety this is the only life I know. It is the life I love. — Robert Helpmann

Where did my friend go? Was there a place they all gathered, the lost and self destructive? Was there a room they put them in? Necks burnt with rope or holes in their skulls. Beach-water bloated. I will know this at the end of my conversation with life. I will speak and laugh until my tongue falls out and then I will know this. I will know because he will tell me when I see him. How will I enter the theatre? With a hole in my head or exploded by sea. Wrists. — Brendan Cowell

Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you. — Eleanor Catton

There's a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre. — Boman Irani

Q: Best part about being a musical theatre book writer?
A: Explaining what that is. — Christy Hall

In his treatise on the battles between the gods underlying ancient Dionysian theatre, the young Nietzsche notes: 'Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them.' Similarly, an anthropology of the practising life is infected by its subject. Dealing with practices, asceticisms and exercises, whether or not they are declared as such, the theorist inevitably encounters his own inner constitution, beyond affirmation and denial. — Peter Sloterdijk

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater. — Antonin Artaud

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you. In short, entertainment fulfills our expectations. Art, on the other hand, makes no compromise for public taste as it inspires us to consider life's complexities and ambiguities. Art is the opposition testing the strength of societal and cultural values-values that are thoughtlessly adopted by the mass of individuals living unexamined lives and all who cannot imagine a different way of seeing life. — William Missouri Downs

The great lesson in theatre is that you live the story every night, and that is a wonderful vehicle for getting to the richest places in a performance or investing a character with the richest life. — Celia Weston

I did theatre all my life and then went into the film world. I then kind of segued into TV land, which is a different experience. — T. J. Thyne

I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me. — Isadora Duncan

Life in the theatre isn't necessarily when you get money from performing. It isn't when you sign a contract. It isn't even when you are in a play. It's when you understand it. If you understand it, you'll know why you want to act. — Stella Adler

When I'm doing theatre, I feel like my life's on hold. Even though you might go out for a coffee, or go and see a film, your brain is still there, pulling you back to it. — Shirley Henderson

Victoria had the discipline of being a queen to help her through the biggest trial of her life - when she lost Albert and faltered. I've had the discipline of the theatre to help me over the ups and downs. A wonderful life . Go it old girl. You've done it well. — Helen Hayes

At the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, Sanford Meisner said, 'When you go into the professional world, at a stock theatre somewhere, backstage, you will meet an older actor, someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes, about life in the theatre. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man!' — David Mamet

But men must know, that in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on. — Francis Bacon

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'm trying to make it a little bit more personal this time. All my shows are hodge-podges, and this one is no exception but this one delves a little more deeper into my life and my world. Hopefully it's funny. I did a version of this at Birdland last January and it's similar-ish to what I've done before. But I've been working on it all year; I did it out here in Los Angeles in a theatre and kept developing it. Hopefully it'll be better. — Jason Graae

Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor's search is a generous quest for that larger meaning. That's why acting is never to be done passively. — Stella Adler

The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy. — Isaac Deutscher

Trying to pump breath into a fairy tale is as arduous and tragic as ancient Greek theatre. — Terry A. O'Neal

Dance, theatre, etc. as art, will disappear along with the dominating 'expression' of tragedy and harmony: the movement of life itself will become harmonious. — Piet Mondrian