Theater Stage Quotes & Sayings

I have never directed anything for the stage. I studied for three years in the theater, and it was a very, very scary experience to direct live, being so vulnerable without the possibility to control things, to be so exposed. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don't train - at all really - for film acting. It's mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage. — Adam Driver

I've had a long association with the theater over the years but I had never produced a play and it was something that I'd always wanted to do.The movies moved away from dramas, and I think that I'm very excited by the opportunity to take smart writing that takes risks and see it on stage. It's exciting to see that engagement between the audience and the playwright. — Colin Callender

The theater has fallen into the hands of real estate men and syndicates and those who have no love or interest in the stage or its life, but who have considered it principally as a means to make money. — Eva Le Gallienne

For theater, the fashion had to have a certain grandeur that would read on the stage while also flattering the actress. The same thing applies when doing a wedding dress, but the treatments can be more delicate and there can be much more detail. — Austin Scarlett

I was taking a nap in the theater one day while I ditched English, when I looked up and saw Jess on the stage. I had to pinch myself, because I figured either I was dreaming or else I'd died and gone to heaven - which given my history was probably not where I'd end up. — Carolee Dean

I want to be back on Broadway one day. That's a dream of mine. There's nothing like live theater, and I think it's so important for me to be able to be on stage with an audience that responds. — Naturi Naughton

It has been my experience that work on the screen clarifies stage portrayals and vice versa. You learn to make your face express more in making movies, and in working for the theater you have a sense of greater freedom. — Fredric March

I regard the theater 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. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage. — Thornton Wilder

We see the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step toward freedom. And in this same act we find the conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic discipline — Peter Berger

A young ballplayer looks on his first spring training trip as a stage struck young woman regards the theater. — Christy Mathewson

At that first preview, it was disorienting to watch more than 200 strangers stream into the theater, hailing from God-knows-where. They didn't know they were obstructing what had very recently been Andy's path to the stage, or occupying the spot where Tommy liked to preside, arms crossed, a couple of fingers to his lips. But as Alexander Hamilton kept trying to tell us, even the best-ordered societies need infusions of new blood to thrive. Keep it in mind the next time you go to the theater: Some gifted men and women have built a community in that room, and the immigrant is you. — Jeremy McCarter

Our only competition in the theater is boredom, because if I'm bored with a play, if I'm revolted by a play on stage, with the Broadway prices, especially today, I'm going to walk out and not come back and pay that price again. — Jerome Lawrence

Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York. — Ira Sachs

I try to get on stage whenever I can. I'm always trying to be involved in the theater, doing something on stage, whenever I have downtime. I'm always looking for it. — Scott Bakula

Too often in their church life people adopt an attitude of the theater, imagining the preacher is an actor and they his critics, praising and blaming the performances. Actually, the people are the actors on the stage of life. The preacher is merely the prompter, reminding the people of their lost lines. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it. — Jeremy Irons

I'll eventually go back to theater because the feeling of being on stage where you have the audience right there, you can't replace that with anything. — Sanaa Lathan

I did stand-up for a long time, and I did classical theater. As much time as you could spend on a stage will always inform you and your job, as you evolve. I feel the freedom of being able to find comedy in the darkest moments because it makes it way more interesting, I think. — Kevin Durand

I certainly did plays in high school and community theater, and I want to get back on the stage. — Busy Philipps

I'm a master of story. Almost a living fiction myself, so resilient am I! Spider-Man beats me down, I rise! Daredevil imprisons me, I escape! That's because stories have power! He who controls the narrative controls the audience, and you're all the audience, every one of you. As they say, the world's a stage ... — Mark Waid

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. — William Shakespeare

I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there. — Kim Cattrall

If you can sell that you're the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you're a starship captain or a time traveler. — David Tennant

For me the whole world is like a gigantic theater in which I am the only spectator without opera glasses. The orchestra plays the prelude to the third act, the stage is far away as in a dream, my heart swells with delight - and you want to blind me with a pair of half-ruble spectacles? — Isaac Babel

I wasn't even in a theater because I guess nobody believed in me, so I was in the hallway of a theater on a platform that they would move so the main stage show could go on at eight o'clock and I'd be gone. — John Leguizamo

The only thing I haven't done as an actor, other than Thai puppet theater somewhere, is act on a Broadway stage. — John Larroquette

If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last act. — Konstantin Stanislavski

Theater will always be a huge part of my life. The high I get from doing theater is not, quite honestly, matched by many things. I like the fact that when you step out on the stage, for that given night, for better or for worse, you are the master of the boards. I love it to death. — Chris Pine

And it's a preference, a long-held preference, what you might call a 'habit of mind' - putting words into other people's mouths. And those people are played by people whose profession is to pretend to be other people. For which purpose, they adopt gestures, voices, intonations, even sexual attitudes not their own. On stage, they affect to be ravished and amused by someone whom they will, afterwards, run a mile to avoid having dinner with. Likewise, they spit torrents of abuse against an actor who later, later, in the softness of the night, they will share their bed with. — David Hare

On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters - words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater. — Alan Alda

In the first manifesto that we launched on the 8th of March, 1910, from the stage of the Chiarella Theater in Turin,1 we expressed our deep-rooted disgust with, our proud contempt for, and our happy rebellion against vulgarity, mediocrity, the fanatical and snobbish worship of all that is old, attitudes which are suffocating Art in our Country. — Umberto Boccioni

I'd been out of the movies for years, I had had a wonderful stage career, yes, in musicals and so on, but you don't really make any money in the theater. — Angela Lansbury

I've always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that's where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you're around other vocal artists, you get better at singing. — Zac Efron

Obviously, doing TV and doing theater are completely different because they're two totally different mediums. On stage, you worry about your voice and how you move physically. On TV, something like an eye twitch is what they could be looking for from you because it's so contained. — Jake Epstein

There's the beauty of the stage. I don't like filmed theater or opera because you're kind of playing soccer in a hockey game. Either or, they don't do justice to the media and you end up with a hybrid that is purely sensationalistic. Opera is a very theatrical medium that should be seen on a stage with the musicians in the pit in the audience. — Christoph Waltz

A farmer's work in many ways is like setting a stage. In theater, stage managers lay out furniture and props, set up lights, and clean to get a set ready for actors to take over and create a show. Farmers plow, fertilize, set up irrigation systems and fences, and otherwise prep the stage of their farms for the real actors -- the sun and the life within the seeds and animals -- to create the show. — Ben Hartman

I did not see myself as a leading lady. I thought I was really funny-looking and I would never be the lead, and I certainly would never do film or television. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to be the grand dame of the American stage. — Kathy Baker

I love Back Stage. I have lots of theater friends and actors who depend on Back Stage. — Anurag Kashyap

I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years. — Andy Serkis

Of course, ministers look upon theaters as rival attractions, and most of their hatred is born of business views. They think people ought to be driven to church by having all other places closed. In my judgment the theater has done good, while the church has done harm. The drama never has insisted upon burning anybody. Persecution is not born of the stage. — Robert Green Ingersoll

I like to think of myself as some of the Scotch tape that holds things together - I'm very handy to have around. But all that actors really need is a bare stage. Lighting is just one of the luxuries of the theater. — Jean Rosenthal

People don't know this, but I'm going through a lot every time I walk on stage, which is part of doing theater. That's why it's so addictive, I must say. — Ricky Martin

Film and stage are very different; I don't necessarily prefer one over the other. Every few years, I get a big itch to go back to the theater. To learn humility, to learn bravery and to remind yourself that the pistons that drive your craft are working on full power. And to remind yourself how badly paid actors can be. — Rhys Ifans

In my theater pieces, I would do "Tits on the Head" - Polaroid photos for $10 on the stage. There would be a line of folks paying me $10 for their turn. It was public prostitution. I turned my whole audience into johns. But because it was in a theater context, an art context, it was socially acceptable. — Annie Sprinkle

Seems like everybody has seen 'Cooley High.' That's what put me on the map. Garrett Morris and I go way back, even before the movie. Great guy. We've done theater and stage plays together, Lincoln Center and all kinds of things. — Glynn Turman

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

The play takes place on a ramp, hanging from a ramp, below a ramp, and to the sides of a ramp. — Rosalyn Drexler

I enjoy theater just for the sheer excitement of it and the immediate response that you get, and how every night the audience is a little bit different; but then, it's expensive to work in N.Y., and stage work is limited, so you're just doing it for the art. — Dorian Missick

Theater is about surprises and things that you haven't seen before on stage. — Kevin McCollum

I worked a lot in Chicago's theater scene as a fight choreographer. And so I do have a lot of experience in stage combat and also in Kabuki dance and Kabuki theater. — Nick Offerman

Film is mostly a visual medium, and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance. For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, 'Out you go,' and the actors are in charge of that stage every night. — David Lindsay-Abaire

I think, as an actor, it is good to feel the fear of failing miserably. I think you should take that risk. Fear is a necessary ingredient in everything I do. But if I do 'Hamlet,' it will probably be in a small theater on a small stage, and it will have to be very, very soon because I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it. — Johnny Depp

A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist. — Constantin Stanislavski

I'm one of those pathetic actors who will say yes to every play reading just because I do miss the stage so much. What I really miss about the theater is that in the end, it's yours to give. In television and film, it's yours to do and someone else's to take and someone else's to give. As much as I love television - the biggest luxury of all is to know that you have a job to go to - I do miss that connection and having that power over my own performance on stage. — Julianna Margulies

The room is full of adult Honeywells talking about the things that Honeywells always talk about, which is to say everything, horses and houses and God and grouting, tanning salons and - of course - theater. Always theater. Honeywells like to talk. When Honeywells have no lines to speak, they improvise. All the world's a stage. — Stephanie Perkins

I think I can work anywhere, but you don't get the same kind of inspiration everywhere. New York theater has become a big inspiration for me. I only started writing for the stage myself because I like to see the good, mostly off-Broadway plays in New York. — Daniel Kehlmann

There was something about the Cleveland Play House that was the holiest place - you know, with the ghost light on the stage and the brick. It was just the most beautiful theater in the world. — Kathryn Hahn

Anybody that goes to the theater, I think we're all misfits, so we ended up on stage or in the audience. — Patti LuPone

In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles ... And if we want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history, detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery. — Gaston Bachelard

Acting has been my passion from the minute I started. I was pretty young when I wanted to be a doctor, but when I started doing theater work as a freshman in high school, the first time I hit the stage I was like, If I can do this every day, life won't get any better! — Sophia Bush

I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting. — Alfred Molina

There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show-all are family. — John Kander

The cast, staff, and crew of a live theater work together toward a common goal: a good performance. Thus, theater is necessarily a group effort. However, it is never a group effort of vague fellow committee members, but of associated autocrats-a playwright, a producer, a director, a stage manager, designers, and, above all, actors. Each accommodates the others, and may overlap others in function when necessary. But each autocrat assumes distinct responsibilities and accepts them completely. — Laurence Sterne

At one time musical theater, particularly in the '40s and '50s, was a big source of pop songs. That's how musical theater started, really - it was just a way of linking several pop songs for the stage. — Neil Tennant

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths. — Mark Waid

All the world's a stage. Creative work is a kind of theater. The stage is your studio, your desk, or your workstation. The costume is your outfit - your painting pants, your business suit, or that funny hat that helps you think. The props are your materials, your tools, and your medium. The script is just plain old time. An hour here, or an hour there - just time measured out for things to happen. — Austin Kleon

I trained in theater. And I started in theater with my first two jobs doing stage plays. — Kit Harington

'Scandal' has been, for me, the most consistent time I've ever logged in front of a camera. I grew up in the theater, and I feel very confident and comfortable on the stage and in front of a live audience, but the camera is a very different medium. — Katie Lowes

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley — Jennifer Lee Carrell

What brought me to the theater, no matter you're a Jew or a Russian or Armenian or Latvian, are suddenly illuminated by stage light and one beautiful image of dance. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

While we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, they're actually chaotic and opaque. There's no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances. There's no internal spectator of a Cartesian theater in our heads to applaud the march of consciousness across its stage. — Daniel Dennett

The shows at the Hilton are the most exciting shows I've ever done. The stage is huge, but the theater is intimate, so we can have a magnificent production and still connect with the audience. — Barry Manilow

I never want to pigeonhole myself or get typecast. I'm looking forward to my career and showing all of my range as an actress, and I'm looking at other mediums, too. I'm a theater actress first. And I cannot wait to return to the stage. — Samira Wiley

I never met my theater fans. I'm out the stage door five minutes after the curtain goes up. So that's it. I don't even know who comes, but thank God they do come. I can't tell. I keep my head down. I don't meet them. The fans from "Harry Potter" are kids who stop me in the street. I love that. That's terrific. I was amazed how many do. — Michael Gambon

It's not always true that all the world's a stage. Sometimes it's a boxing ring. Right now I had a ringside seat at the Windjammer restaurant in Etonville, New Jersey. — Suzanne M. Trauth

I remember growing up knowing I wanted to be on the stage. I wanted to get to London as soon as possible and start auditioning for theater. — Catherine Zeta-Jones

Once I have the finished sculpture, I'll put it out on the street or in nature or somewhere where it interacts with the environment. Really it's kind of the idea of turning the street into a stage and this sort of urban theater has a life of its own. If you have creative drive, and you need to manifest it, then you need some sort of medium to do that through. For me, it worked out with sculpture, and tape just is a means of doing sculpture. — Mark Jenkins

In my photographic work I'm generally attracted to places that contain memories, history, atmospheres and stories. I'm interested in the places where people have lived, worked and played. I look for traces of the past, visual fingerprints, evidence of activities - they fire my imagination and connect into my own personal experiences. Using the analogy of the theater, I would say that I like to photograph the empty stage, before or after the performance, even in between acts. I love the atmosphere of anticipation, the feeling in the air that events have happened, or will happen soon ... — Michael Kenna

It's about that applause I want to speak to you. I want you to remember that when you've done a little dance or a song or sketch, the applause which you get is not only because you yourself have done your best, but because each of those men is seeing in you someone he loves at home, and because of you is able to forget for a little while the unhappiness of not being in his home, and in some cases the great tragedy of not knowing what has happened to the children in his family. — Noel Streatfeild

I want to do stage again, because there just aren't words for how great it is. People say that all the time, 'There's nothing like live theater, blah blah,' but it's really true. I see a show and I know how they feel, and it feels great. — Anna Kendrick

Theater cannot include only people. What acts on stage is matter. — Gaetano Pesche

I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously. — Mike Nichols

I trained as a theater actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by. — Benicio Del Toro

When real actors are approaching their work, we could be on a little stage somewhere, doing community theater. It's all the same. They're just trying to make the scene work. They're just trying to do the best they can and figure it out. — Kurt Fuller

Immediate gratification of a live audience makes me come alive. I miss performing in theater. I'll make my return to the stage eventually. — Brendan Dooling

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater. — Ray Bradbury

It's really an amazing feeling because you're flying in a car that's on stage and to be this age also, and in the theater and then with a huge audience of 1,800 people backing you up and cheering you on. It's a really amazing feeling. — Ellen Marlow

Any earthly production would have been cancelled at the slightest suggestion of rain, but this was William's Stage - it was William's call - and if the children danced and the congregation remained transfixed, the show would go on. — Jake Vander Ark

So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater. — George Jean Nathan

Talking about theater, actually, I built a little barn in upstate New York, and I call it 'the smallest theater in the world,' but it has a mini stage and a red velvet curtain. — Philippe Petit

Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare? — Jennifer Donnelly

When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way. — Suzanne Farrell

A few moments after he found himself on the stage amid the garish gas and the dim scenery, acting before the innumerable faces of the void. It surprised him to see that the play which he had known at rehearsals for a disjointed lifeless thing had suddenly assumed a life of its own. It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow actors aiding it with their parts. When the curtain fell on the last scene he heard the void filled with applause and, through a rift in a side scene, saw the simple body before which he had acted magically deformed, the void of faces breaking at all points and falling asunder into busy groups. — James Joyce

When a theater goes dark for the night, a stagehand leaves a lighted lamp on stage. No one knows why any more, but some old timers say it is to keep the ghosts away. Others say it lights the stage for the ghosts to play. Whichever theory one adheres to, most people agree: a great theater is haunted. — Emily Mann

I really wanted to go back to the theater, the live theater. That was the thing I had never had a chance to do, even though I had trained to be a stage actress. — Angela Lansbury

A friend of mine had his own theater company, and he jumped me in like I was in a gang. And once I came in, it was just that simple. For the first time in my life, I felt, 'This is a career, this is a life that I think I can grow old doing.' It was love at first sight. I loved being on stage and reading these plays. It was great. — David Alan Grier

I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living. — John Steinbeck

You can be a little bit darker and rougher on the stage, partly because when you're in the theater, people have come to see you, and so they kind of know what they're in for. In television, you are sort of sneaking into people's homes. So, I think you can be a little bit darker on stage. — Tina Fey

It's interesting - years ago, I had such bad stage fright during musical theater auditions that I just gave up. And now I'm on Broadway. — Tom Lenk