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The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.
-Minnie Maddern Fiske
Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting and the Problems of Production, ch. 5, by Alexander Woollcott (1917)
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Be reflective...and stay away from the theater as much as you can. Stay out of the theatrical world, out of its petty interests, its inbreeding tendencies, its stifling atmosphere, its corroding influence. Once become
-Minnie Maddern Fiske
As quoted in Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting and the Problems of Production, ch. 3, by Alexander Woollcott (1917).
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The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.
-David Hare
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Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising.
-Vaclav Havel
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I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
-Vaclav Havel
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The world's a theatre, the earth a stage,
Which God and nature do with actors fill
-John Heywood
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Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.
-Abbie Hoffman
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The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout.
-Robert Holman
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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
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The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.
-Alfred Jarry
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The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
-Alfred Jarry
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The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.
-Samuel Johnson
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I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre.
-Barrie Keeffe
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Reviewers...must normally function as huff-and-puff artists blowing laggard theatergoers stageward.
-Walter Kerr
Statement quoted in NY Times, September 30, 1983
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Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite right. They will be.
-Agnes De Mille
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By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.
-Arthur Miller
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A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.
-Arthur Miller
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Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
-Sir John Mortimer
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The drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candle-sticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense or myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on it's roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.
-Sean O'Casey
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My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive.
-Gwyneth Paltrow
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It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.
-William Prynne
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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
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Good drama must be drastic.
-Friedrich Von Schlegel
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O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
-William Shakespeare
Henry V (prologue)
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In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Books about Theater
