Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous
old theatre quotes, theatre sayings, and theatre proverbs, collected over the years from a variety
of sources.
Drama has to do with circumstance, tragedy has to do with individual choice. David Mamet
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The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure. Oscar Wilde
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Welcome to the Theatre, / To the magic, to the fun! / Where painted trees and flowers grow, / And laughter rings fortissimo, / And treachery's sweetly done. Lee Adams
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The difficulty about a theatre job is that it inteferes with party-going.Barry Humphries
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If any play has been produced only twice in three hundred years, there must be some good reason for it. Rupert Hart-Davis
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I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions—the curtain was up. Groucho Marx
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We open in Venice, / We next play Verona, / Then on to Cremona. / Lotsa laughs in Cremona.Cole Porter
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The theatre seems to be chronically twenty years behind, regardless of realism, as the relation of Beckett to Joyce, for example show. The theatre feeds on the novel; never vice versa: think of the hundreds of dramatizations of novels, and then try to think of a book that was "novelized" for a play. There is not even a word for it. Mary Mccarthy
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Then to the well-trod stage anon, / If Jonson's learned sock be on, / Or sweetest Shakespeare fancy child, / Warble his native wood-notes wild. John Milton
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Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.James Agate
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Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy. Brooks Atkinson
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Anyone can do theatre. Even actors. And theatre can be done everywhere. Even in a theatre.Augusto Boal
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You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator. Ralph Richardson
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I’m really very sorry for you all, but it’s an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.W.S. Gilbert
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I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theatre is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.Laurence Olivier
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Acting is a sport. On stage you must be ready to move like a tennis player on his toes. Your concentration must be keen, your reflexes sharp; your body and mind are in top gear, the chase is on. Acting is energy. In the theatre people pay to see energy.Clive Swift
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The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime.Iris Murdoch
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Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it’s gone.Simon McBurney
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Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to fantasize about a world we aspire to.Willem Dafoe
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Musical theatre history is littered with bad reviews for now classic pieces.Andrew Lloyd Webber
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Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.Mary Pickford
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All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts.William Shakespeare
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We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.Tom Stoppard