Theater and Film quote to let us in on the secrets, knowledge, and information practitioners have shared over the years. Some are truly inspiring, revealing, and humorous. Here are a few of the remarks, quotes, and phrases are given to us by those who’ve been there and done that.
“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what.”
[I saw hate in a graveyard — Stephen Fry, The Guardian, 5 June 2005]”
― Stephen Fry
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
-ANTONIN ARTAUD, The Theatre and Its Double
Good actors, never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.
JESSICA ALBA, Elle Magazine, Dec. 2010
Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life. Quitting acting, that’s the sign of maturity.
MARLON BRANDO, attributed, Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s and Video Viewer’s Companion
It’s the actors who are prepared to make fools of themselves who are usually the ones who come to mean something to the audience.
CHRISTIAN BALE, attributed, Christian Bale: the Dark Knight Unmasked
Acting is a marvelous profession … If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don’t have to think too much about your own character and motivations.
DEAN KOONTZ, Odd Hours
I used to have a certain dislike of the audience, not as individual people, but as a giant body who was judging me. Of course, it wasn’t really them judging me. It was me judging me. Once I got past that fear, it freed me up, not just when I was performing but in other parts of my life.
JULIE ANDREWS, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Feb. 2000
Once in a while I experience an emotion onstage that is so gut-wrenching, so heart-stopping, that I could weep with gratitude and joy. The feeling catches and magnifies so rapidly that it threatens to engulf me.
JULIE ANDREWS, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
It’s what I learn from the great actors that I work with. Stillness. That’s all and that’s the hardest thing.
MORGAN FREEMAN, “A Taste of Freeman”, Film Freak Central, July 20, 2015
I’ve been planted here to be a vessel for acting … that’s why I’m really taking any part, regardless of how complicated it’s going to be.
LEONARDO DICAPRIO, attributed, The Leonardo DiCaprio Album
For almost every character I’ve played in the 43 years I’ve been working as a professional actor, I’ve found parts of myself. We are all bipolar in the tiniest essence of what it is. We are all multiple personalities, in a sense, and to be healthy mentally, I think, learning what those multiple personalities are and inviting them in your life is really important.
SALLY FIELD, Ability Magazine, Feb. 2009
Work was never about wanting fame or money. I never thought about that. I loved getting the job, going to rehearsal, playing someone else, hanging around with a bunch of actors. I needed that, the way you need water.
SARAH JESSICA PARKER, Sam Magazine, 2005
The experience of acting in the film frame is akin to that of our primal ancestors who wandered solo away from their tribes across unfamiliar terrain to see what else was out there. You are skilled; you are adventurous; you are totally unprepared for what you will encounter. In the film frame, you need all your wits about you and a courage beyond what you think yourself capable.
JOHN SWANBECK, “Why Film Acting Is a Lonely Art”, Backstage, March 1, 2016
I’m curious about people. That’s the essence of my acting. I’m interested in what it would be like to be you.
MERYL STREEP
The problem with drama school is that you will most likely graduate an entitled twat.
ANDREW HEARLE, “Forget you Went to Acting School (Immediately)”, StageMilk, May 13, 2018
Acting is an astonishingly easy profession. I’ve given no more thought to my best roles than I have to my worst.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD, Tallulah: My Autobiography
What they teach in these acting schools is incredible, hair-raising crap.
KLAUS KINSKI, Kinski Uncut: The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski
I can act every single day because I love it; it’s just so liberating. It might be rare, but there are certain moments when you really don’t feel like yourself.
LILY-ROSE DEPP, “Lily-Rose Depp on why acting is life”, New Zealand Herald, February 2, 201
If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something and if it ain’t … take two.
JACK NICHOLSON, attributed, The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen
The actor’s work requires them to lower their barriers — the barriers we erect to protect ourselves — it requires them to drop the carefully composed masks we wear to help us negotiate our way in the world.
JAMES DEVEREAUX, “The Dignity of the Actor”, The Great Acting Blog, October 16, 2017
The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.
ANTHONY HOPKINS, attributed, Movie Speak: How to Talk Like You Belong on a Movie Set
here is a place in the universe not for the faint of heart. It is a place where you must be completely vulnerable without ever expecting a hug. It is a place where you make earth-shattering discoveries you will never be able to share. It is a place where you face the limitations of being human in the face of another’s pain. That place is the film frame.
JOHN SWANBECK, “Why Film Acting Is a Lonely Art”, Backstage, March 1, 2016
“All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.” – Seán O’Casey
“Theatre is a sacred space for actors. You are responsible; you are in the driving-seat.” – Greta Scacchi
“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.” ― Oscar Wilde.
“The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe.”
― P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
“How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.”
― Antonin Artaud,
“I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience.”
― Shelley Winters
“Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?”
― Jennifer Donnelly,
“I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
“On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer’s daughter, a mad and murderous king.”
― Jennifer Donnelly,
“Then everyone leaves, and you are left, each night, to your own devices with a crowd of interesting people – most of whom you don’t know – sitting in the dark.”
― Anna Deavere Smith
“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”
― Tom Stoppard
“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”
― John Steinbeck, Once there Was a War
“Something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire
“Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.”
― Vincent H. O’Neil, Death Troupe
“The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.”
― Marsha Norman
“If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last act”.”
― Stanislavski, Constantin S.
“Did I tell you what happened at the play? We were at the back of the theatre, standing there in the dark, when all of a sudden I feel one of ’em tug at my sleeve, whispers, “Trudy look!” I said, “Yeah, goosebumps. You definitely got goosebumps. You like the play that much?” They said it wasn’t the play that gave ’em goosebumps, it was the audience!
I’d forgot to tell them to watch the play; they’d been watching the audience! Yeah, to see a group of people sitting together in the dark, laughing and crying at the same things…well that just knocked ’em out! They said, “Trudy, the play was soup, the audience, art.”
So they’re taking goosbumps back with ’em into space. Goosebumps! Quite a souvenir. I like to think of them out there in the dark, watching us. Sometimes we’ll do something and they’ll laugh. Sometimes we’ll do something and they’ll cry. And maybe, one day we’ll do something so magnificent, the whole universe will get goosebumps.”
― Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
“I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”
“The text is your greatest enemy.”
― Sanford Meisner, Sanford Meisner on Acting
“If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.
But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.”
― Tom Stoppard
“If Patti Lupone was born to play Evita then Madonna was born to play Patti Lupone playing Evita.”
― Buck Bannister
“The American actor is very lucky… Because so little is asked of him.”
― Sanford Meisner
“Physicality is the basis of performanc― David Petersen, The Well-Tempered Body: Expressive Movement for Actors, Improvisers, and Performance Artists
“The play takes place on a ramp, hanging from a ramp, below a ramp, and to the sides of a ramp.”
― Rosalyn Drexler, The Line of Least Existence and Other Plays
“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, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough draft is just that. You can’t polish what you haven’t written.
Things that made for a normal life—like a daily routine that followed the sun—took a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn’t a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep.
He would often awake with a new idea—as if he’d merely been on a break and not unconscious—and he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot’s seat in a ship that could go anywhere.”
― Vincent H. O’Neil, Death Troupe
“I’d forgotten how arrogant people are in the theater, I’m agreeing to starve for a year and he seems to think I should be pleased to have the part.”
― Timberlake Wertenbaker, The Break of Day
“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, Via Dolorosa & When Shall We Live?
“Hans Christian Andersen:
We co-write them. I just don’t do any of the writing. I change the bits I don’t like and then erase all the rest from history. I’m more like a German theatre director. Or, y’know, a German generally.”
― Martin McDonagh, A Very Very Very Dark Matter
“The thespian is an impostor, but the paying crowd colludes fully in the fraud as they seek to leave real problems behind to indulge in the fictitious ones of another. Hence adulation towards a performer starts.”
― Stewart Stafford
“How funny things are! You go to those museums and galleries and think what a damned bore they are and then, when you least expect it, you find that something you’ve seen comes in useful. It shows art and all that isn’t really waste of time.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre
“The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts. This is the only place for our Dream. No form nor interpretation is for ever. A form has to become fixed for a short time, then it has to go. As the world changes, there will and must be new and totally unpredictable Dreams.”
― Peter Brook, The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare
“But the old Italian commedia that I loved—Pantaloon, Harlequin, Scaramouche, and the rest—lived on as they always had, with tightrope walkers, acrobats, jugglers, and puppeteers, in the platform spectacles at the St.-Germain and the St.-Laurent fairs.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
“I once got hit by revolving scenery in a production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It whacked my hip, bruised my ego, got an unintentional laugh, but the show went on, and it still does.”
― Stewart Stafford
“The relations of philosophy and theater are not commonly treated topics. When we think of theater we tend to light on two great periods, namely, Elizabethan England and ancient Athens. The latter we associate with philosophy, of course, but it is a very one-sided perception to think of the Greeks as philosophers. We should really think of them as a people of art – ein Reich der Kunst as Hölderlin calls Greece, and Hegel speaks of greek religion as a Kunstreligion, religion in the form of art. We do not think of Elizabethan England as a high period of philosophical reflection, and yet anyone who thinks Shakespeare’s work is not saturated with philosophical significance surely has a very narrow sense of what it means to be philosophical. His dramas are, so to say, philosophy in performatives.”
― William Desmond
“[…] the drama upon the stage is sometimes no more than an intensification of the rituals within our own hearts.”
― Peter Ackroyd, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree
“Lin says the sensation of standing in the middle of these unsettling effects is a distilled version of how he feels throughout the show: “I am staying in my lane and doing what I’m supposed to do while everyone is doing what they do at the height of their abilities, and if I move to the left or right, I’ll get hit with a desk.”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: The Revolution
“Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.”
― Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
“There’s always one sure way of finding out that you’re a misfit. When you’re eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch ‘Twilight’ and that it was “sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic!” – but you’ve been spending the summer watching ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Don’t Look Now’ and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart – that’s the moment you realize that you’re a misfit.”
― Rebecca McNutt
“I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.”
― David Byrne, How Music Works
“I shall give you hunger, and pain, and sleepless nights. Also beauty
and satisfactions known to few and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these you shall have continually and of their coming and going you shall not be foretold.”
― The God of All the Arts to Edwin Booth
“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
“[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn’t see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.”
Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical.
Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed:
(Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are “underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action” like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like “Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory” or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after “quite” or saying “fusskle” instead of “farcical”.)
Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed:
Gregory: You’re just pulling my leg.”
― Kingsley Amis, I Like it Here
“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, Daredevil, Volume 7
“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, Daredevil, Volume 7
“You are the antidote to any received behaviour. Take a walk when you can. Be alone when you can. Talk to people you care about when you can. We try our best, and somehow it’s not enough. We are broken people, the theater shows this. Yet we don’t let being inadequate keep us from giving our very best every time. If professionalism has taken the practice of performing to a place where broken human behavior is not acceptable, then it is the medium that is broken, and not the other way around.
For at our essence, at our core, we are not professionals. We are amateurs. We are myth, history and advertising, but, still, we exist; we are real, and we are simply beginners. It’s how we thrive. We begin and therefore perpetually remain connected to the spark. We ask questions, we thirst, and we learn. And the dissenters complete us, causing us to be better.”
― Richard Maxwell, Theater for Beginners
“Magnus had caught it gingerly, half expecting it to blow in his face.
The Teacher chuckled. “Don’t worry, it can’t do anything without fire.”
The thing looked and felt pretty innocuous, actually. It was shorter and fatter than a candlestick, and not colored red like it was in the comic books or the new Technicolor cartoons that still ran at the cinema every Saturday afternoon. Magnus had no money for such things anymore, but sometimes he and Kiki- another boy who worked for the Resistance- sneaked into the theater through an unlocked window.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Apple Orchard
“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, Theater Shoes
“The best things in life make you sweaty.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
