Elizabethian Theatre Quotes

Bad is the world, and all will come to naught
when such ill-dealing must be seen in thought. ~ William Shakespeare

My parents started with very little and were the only ones in their families to graduate from college. As parents, they focused on education, but did not stop at academics - they made sure that we knew music, saw art and theatre and traveled - even though it meant budgeting like crazy. ~ Jennifer Garner

During the war, my mother used to take me to the local repertory theatre on a Monday night, and we used to get two seats for the price of one, for nine pence, in the gods. ~ Geraldine McEwan

I did theatre when I was nine, I think. Nine and ten, and that was just the beginning of my whole involvement in acting, my whole interest. I don't really remember it that well. But it was really fun. I mean, it was exciting just to be on stage in front of an audience. It gives you a different kind of rush. ~ Amanda Seyfried

Doing gigs is great, but when you come together for a production in the theatre, that is something I have a lot of respect for. ~ Eliza Doolittle

Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere. ~ Bill Veeck

Every now and then I have to teach directing. The thing about the theatre is that the most important thing you can do as a director is to make sure that everybody is in the same world - you have to create the world and make sure everyone buys into it. ~ Stephen Daldry

'Doctor Who' was my first telly job, and before that I did a lot of theatre in education, children's theatre. ~ Sophie Aldred

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness. ~ Antonin Artaud

I take great pride in recalling that I could open in a play on Broadway or in London's West End and fill a theatre on the strength of my name - Steed's name. ~ Patrick Macnee

I do still like television very much, but the theatre does really have something special about it. ~ Sarah Sutton

If you want to get into the shoes of someone, it's not just about seeing and hearing. It is also about what you touch and what you smell. Smell is so specific and so powerful. And this is the beauty of immersive theatre - it's something you cannot get in any other art form. I think this is the real future for theatre. ~ Lucien Bourjeily

The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression. ~ Harold Pinter

I'd never seen a guy my own age play the piano. It was like sex and musical theatre fused together. ~ E. Lockhart

From there I did a one year theatre acting course in Fife, and then three years of drama school in London. ~ Ewan McGregor

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission. ~ Lady Gaga

I went to school, majored in theatre, and said 'Mom, I have to choose my own destiny. I want to be an actor.' A couple of weeks after I graduated college I called my mother up and said 'Can I borrow $200?' and she said 'Why don't you act like you've got $200.' ~ Arsenio Hall

I was convinced that acting was for fools. I was on the stage when I was eight with my father, he was playing one of those Greek blind guys that sees things and warns people, whilst I was in a blue skirt. I think there were 5,000 people in the theatre, it was ridiculous. ~ Rutger Hauer

You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you. The more you pull away from the public, the less power you have on screen. ~ Ben Kingsley

I first got really interested in Noh in about 1977. There was an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana where I was going to high school. It was a really nice place. There was a New Directions paperback. It was the Pound/Fenollosa book, 'The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.' ~ William T. Vollmann

Still, it was impossible to deny: Going all the way to London without taking time out to attend a few horrendous plays was like making a special trip to Hell without ever asking to meet Satan. So this time around, I decided to plunge in headfirst. Never a fan of Noel Coward, I nonetheless reported to the Albery Theatre, forked over a king's ransom for a good seat, and watched Alan Rickman act up a storm in Private Lives. ~ Joe Queenan

To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better. ~ George Bernard Shaw

A fan once stopped me outside a theatre and gave me as a gift a signed photograph of Sir Laurence Olivier. It was strange, but nice, too. ~ David Alan Basche

I was the first African-American woman to play Maggie in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' It was at the Virginia State Theatre, and we turned Richmond upside down. ~ Tamara Tunie

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

Modelling was not very satisfying for me. I came to London to model, and I fell in love with the theatre. I was eating yoghurt every day so that I had the money to go to the theatre. I saw everything. It's still my dream to be on stage in London. ~ Caterina Murino

Television is great but for me, as a performer, nothing compares to a live theatre show. ~ Bruce Forsyth

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. ~ Stella Adler

To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large. ~ Henry James

It's a beautiful city, and the waterfront area is fantastic. I haven't had time to visit the theatre, but I find it remarkable that Toronto has the third-largest English-speaking theatre district in the world, after New York and London. I once noticed a fellow sitting on a bench, then I realized it was a statue of Glenn Gould. It's very realistic. ~ Donald Trump

I feel that I communicate best when I am not deliberately being linear. Along this same line, I feel some of the best sermons I've ever heard were in the theatre rather than the pulpit - as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd. ~ Malcolm Boyd

I feel there's enough seriousness in the world without seeing it in the theatre. ~ Pat Nixon

Rather than disliking theatre, I've expressed a preference for television because it tends to deal in its small way much more with issues and is able to reach a broader church of people than theatre. ~ Christopher Eccleston

It's cold out there, colder than a ticket taker's smile at the Ivar Theatre on a Saturday night. ~ Tom Waits

Places like the National Theatre or Sheffield, these great engines of theatre, make us cutting edge because they can be experimental. They can do plays that nobody else can afford to do in ways nobody else can afford to do. ~ Toby Stephens

I began playing Branson during the 1992 season and was a little amazed. There were about 30 celebrity theatres there and more are being added all the time. ~ Charley Pride

T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress. ~ Banksy