 
|
I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan
|
|
|
|
All this class of pleasures inspires me with the same nausea as I feel at the sight of rich plum-cake or sweetmeats; I prefer the driest bread of common life.
-Sydney Smith
|
|
|
|
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.
-J. M. Synge
|
|
|
|
If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
-James Thurber
|
|
|
|
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, Recalled on his death, July 26, 1980
|
|
|
|
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
-Gore Vidal
|
|
|
|
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
-Gore Vidal
|
|
|
|
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
-Orson Welles
|
|
|
|
I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.
-Orson Welles
|
|
|
|
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
-Oscar Wilde
|
|
|
|
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
|
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
|
Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
|
We live in what is, but we find 1,000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
|
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.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
|
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: Behold! These things are. Yet most dramatists employ it to say: This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
|
Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live.
-Shelley Winters
|
|
Books about Theater
