Story Theatre Quotes & Sayings

When you go into the theatre and the lights dim, you want to entertain people from beginning to end. You want them to be swept up in your story, on the edge of their seats, unable to wait to see what happens next, be blown away and afterwards just go, 'Wow!' — John Lasseter

Theatre artists at the Globe have to ask themselves: how does this moment or scene move the story forward or contribute to our understanding of the story? It — Fiona Banks

I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me. — Christopher Nolan

What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story. — Pete Townshend

As far as I'm concerned, an audience is an audience. Whether it's an audience in Hull or the National Theatre, that's who you play to. It's not money - it's good to get some, but that's not why I do it. You do it because you have to, to tell a story. — Sylvester McCoy

I believe in stories that are non-linear, as we are (hopefully) — Natasha Tsakos

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover. — Sam Shepard

I think theatre to some extent is always about telling stories, isn't it, and I think what I've learned is that freedom comes when you tell your story; freedom comes when you tell the truth. — Eve Ensler

I think the same way about theatre, you go out there and you are creating a world for a moment that can actually have a real impact on people, present some kind of story that gives you something to think about when you walk away, feeling enriched - if it works out well. — Jeffrey Jones

I'm not sure I can name a kind of story that wouldn't work in comics form. It's words and images, and we've been telling all kinds of stories with that combination since theatre was invented thousands of years ago. — James Vance

Scottish Theatre's greatest success story of recent times. — Alan Chadwick

It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I like the detail work of telling a story in small pieces, as is done in movie-making, and also the long leap of faith needed to see a theatre performance through each night. Both require focus and self-discipline. — Viggo Mortensen

It's no longer history in the making.
It's our story we are making. — Natasha Tsakos

I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. — Catherynne M Valente

I love when people laugh. I love when they cry, I like a story to say something, and I hope the audience feels happier leaving the theatre than when it came in. — Leo McCarey

You know, not every good book needs to be a movie, or a television series, or a video game. There's great work in those mediums, of course, but sometimes a book should remain a book. I still believe nothing tells a story with the richness and complexity of a good novel. When people say they think a book would make a good movie, they say this sometimes because, if it worked, they already saw all the images in the movie theatre that is in their brains. And sometimes that is the way it should stay. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don't get impatient in the theatre. — Stephen Sondheim

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

A film that is a true work of art transcends theatre and heartwarmingly changes lives. — A.D. Posey

Theatre is the principal job of an actor. An actor's job is to tell a story to someone in a room. TV and film can be great and I really love doing it, but it is a different way of telling a story. — Sylvester McCoy

Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in. — Stephen Sondheim

I've directed enough in the theatre and a couple of films to know that - to feel fairly secure that if I find a story that I really like I can probably get it done somewhat. — Gary Sinise

I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft. — David Ives

Theatre is pure teleportation by means of suspension.
It's a voyage into the archives of the human imagination.
A passport to all what ifs. — Natasha Tsakos

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

It is usually assumed that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories. In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: "this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty." But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: "this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy"; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate. Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags. — J.R.R. Tolkien

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've always been a huge fan of theatre and performance. The idea of just the human voice and just this night. Live music is the same. They're doing it for you right now. It's an amazing thing. And if you perform a story properly, it can be a transporting, too. — T.C. Boyle

I was hugely formed by stories I was told as a child whether that was in a book, the cinema, theatre or television and probably television more than any medium is what influenced me as a child and formed my response to literature, story-telling and, therefore, the world around me. — David Tennant

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation. — Mark Rylance

Comics are not theatre - there's a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there. — Tom Stoppard