Top 530 Theater Quotes

I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid, but I started doing theater in high school because it was a requirement. At first, I was completely irritated. But I ended up loving it.

As a boy, I’d always had an interest in theater. But the idea at my school was that drama and music were to round out the man. It wasn’t what one did for a living. I got over that.

It’s a tough transition really for theater actors to adjust to television or film, and all of these years later, I still have a tendency to play it too big.

My background is a small town with no movie theater. So… I always pictured myself onstage. I went to acting school and learned all the skills. I left early because I did my first movie and discovered that I really loved the minimalistic work with the camera.

I’m set to have my best year ever: I’m hiring some acts and there will be a show in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. I’m going to use my theater to its fullest potential.

My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it’s in theater or in film, that’s it. It doesn’t really matter what the medium is.

I did a lot of theater in the South side of Chicago.

I’m married to the theater but my mistress is the films.

That’s why I love doing live theater more than anything: You get an immediate reaction, whether it’s good or bad.

There’s something strange about theater. My characters consistently demonize elitism, but of course it’s taking place in a theater where only so many people can see it. I’ve been in silly popcorn movies – the kind of thing that as an actor you might feel embarrassed about – but those movies reach many more people.

What ‘War and Peace’ is to the novel and ‘Hamlet’ is to the theater, Swan Lake’ is to ballet – that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.

I used to do community theater with Conor Oberst.

In theater, you go in-depth with your character, so coming to the States, it was inevitable to dig into the pilots I liked. I knew what characters I was going to be reading for, so I would dissect them and really get involved with them.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it’s story heavy, it’s about ideas.

What’s a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You go to the theater, you’re just so excited to see anything – the moment the lights go down is often the best part.

My film career was always to support my theater career.

I had always been the theater nerd at Northwestern University. I knew I wanted to do acting, but I hated the idea of being this cliche – a girl from L.A. who decides to be an actress.

I did my Doctorate on the House Un-American Activities Committee’s effect on the American theater.

They say that theater is the actor’s medium, television is the writer’s medium and film is the director’s medium, and it’s really true.

The Room’ has just been something that has spread for so many years in such an organic way because, it’s just people wanting to share it with their friends and take people to the theater to see it.

I would love to do a live show with dancers and fashion and scenic elements – definitely bring my love of the theater to a concert-style performance.

Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements.

I mean, part of me would love to be a fat tenured professor of theater someday.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

I was always the smallest role in community theater and school plays. I always had two lines – I was the kid that came on stage and said one thing and then left, and that was my part for the play.

My background is in theater. I was a theater major in college.

I had been doing all my school plays, elementary school, middle school, and high school, and then summer. I’d wanted to act for a long time, and I thought I was going to go to college and do theater, go that route. But ‘Superbad’ kind of fell on my lap. I was very, very lucky for that.

I’m the perfect kind of personality for making YouTube videos. I deal in short attention span theater. I do wild things.

I remember, especially like when I was in high school, going to see like Dawn of the Dead and it was like mayhem in the theater and you could barely even watch the movie. It was so fun.

I was a housepainter and a landscape nursery man, and all these various odd jobs I had, and started doing community theater.

People who are interested in the arts and theater are such a minority.

I fell in love with theater there, and after graduation I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

Making a film or doing a play are completely different experiences and entirely fulfilling, but completely unique. I also think one complements the other. People often say that theater is about flexing your muscles, and is actually real acting, whereas I sort of disagree.

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

I’ve always been drawn to stories and telling them; whether it was through being a part of theater when I was a little kid, or film, or with music, there’s just been an innate desire to feel that connection.

People don’t really want reality. They want theater, and that’s different.

The theater, for me, has always been a place where I’m free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.

I’ve never been passionate about just music, I’ve never seen myself going into music in that sense. My love for music has always been connected to the stories told through music, which is why I was drawn to theater and why I think ‘Glee’ is so powerful.

I went to the theater school at DePaul University in Chicago, the Goodman School.

I think theater is very much my natural home. But the truth is that the older I’ve got, and the more I’ve written film and television, I find it incredibly hard to write theater.

And I think I’m an adrenaline junkie, and there’s nothing that will spike your adrenaline more than sitting in a theater and listen to an audience react to something you’ve written.

It’s that athlete’s obsessiveness – the need to prove yourself and work harder than anybody else. I think it’s what helped me do well in the theater.

I’ve been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there.

I have so much respect for people in the theater. You can’t do 10 or 15 takes. It’s all live. It’s like life in motion.

It is ridiculous to think we can erase racism in South Africa, but through theater there can be a genuine attempt to move on with our lives and build a better country.

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence – putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply – if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.

You must not demand the failure of your peers, because the more good things that are around in film, in television, in theater – why the better it is for all of us.

Soon I worked during twelve years in theater works of the prestigious Theatre National Populaire. It was the best time of my life, the most difficult, the most interesting, the most exciting.

In the beginning, when you’re acting in amateur theater and off-Broadway, it was unheard of that anyone else would get your costume. And it was important to get a good costume. You put time into that.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn’t done my job.

The whole issue is that everyone would love to do theater, but it doesn’t pay enough, so to do music theater on TV, that’s the ultimate dream.

I’m a sort of political person, and I feel that there’s a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it’s overtly political or not.

I love doing this day, and George was exactly as he’s always been, very calm and very gentle, and if I’m in the final cut in the summer theater, I’ll be thrilled. If I’m not, well that’s the way things go.

Theater is my temple and my religion and my act of faith. Strangers sit in a room together and believe together.

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

I left the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin in 2004, and I did five years of theater after that.

My whole life, not just in my professional career but in community theater, I played the supporting role.

From the time that I was in high school, my life really revolved around live theater, so it almost feels genetic.

I’m theater trained.

I thought that my movie career was finished. I was quite happy to dedicate myself 100% to the theater. Surprisingly enough, I’ve never gotten so many work offers. It’s so exciting, this feeling of a new beginning after 40.