theater quotes

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

I don’t have a vast longing for the stage.

I can’t act!

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

My whole life is a theater piece.

I’m not a playwright.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions – the curtain was up.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

I absolutely want to have a career where you make’em laugh and make’em cry. It’s all theater.

My mom always wanted me to be an actor. And I started going to theater and going on auditions young.

Acting is happy agony.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

I want to show audiences I can act.

I played Othello, but I didn’t sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn’t do me any good.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Doing a show for three weeks is nothing like doing a show for seven seasons.