Top 70 Terry Teachout Quotes

I’m not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I’m open to drastic changes that may alter the author’s meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don’t work, then I say so.

The only thing that surprised me about ‘Lincoln’ is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that ‘Lincoln’ is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay.

The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres.

There wasn’t a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri.

The good news is that ‘High School Musical’ seems to be getting a lot of youngsters excited about theater.

I don’t know anybody in the opera business who isn’t worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock.

I suspect that most playgoers don’t understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.

All of the most popular music of the ’30s and ’40s were deeply informed by jazz.

I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing ‘dumber,’ if what you really mean to say is ‘less culturally literate.’

Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher.

Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own.

In a world without any criticism at all, although there are many actors who would think they would be delighted to see that happen, would in fact be a far more problematic world than they could ever imagine.

I learned more in the rehearsals for ‘The Letter’ than I have ever dreamed of know in the theater as a critic. If it doesn’t make me a better critic, I’m an idiot.

Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.

I loved music from earliest childhood – from as long as I can remember.

Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music.

Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. You don’t see it.

I can remember – barely – when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs.

A masterpiece doesn’t push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means – and change it as often as you like.

Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible.

There’s a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative.

Not surprisingly, my parents’ generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn’t do us any good from a cultural point of view. I’m struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age.

Nowadays, most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch ‘Breaking Bad’ as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play – assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet.

‘Man and Superman,’ first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw’s greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours.

The script of a play is not a finished product: It’s a set of instructions.

For my part, I like live theater best when it’s taut, concentrated and intimate.

To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That’s why I write about art.

The setting of ‘Billy Elliot’ is the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing.

I don’t know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television.

Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought.

All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.

Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I’d issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called ‘The American Experience in Art.’

Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn’t lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.

Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the ‘salon painters’ who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.

The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it’s a purely empirical art form. It’s all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.

As late as the early ’50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.

It’s said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black and white. If this is so, I suspect it’s because such films portray an America that no longer exists.

A playwright who limits himself – or is limited – to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray.

Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.

Anna Deavere Smith’s new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that ‘Let Me Down Easy’ is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying.

Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers.

The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck.

I’ve always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto.

In 2004, the iPod was a novelty, and tablet computers were a dream. Now we take for granted that we can see whatever we want whenever and wherever we want to see it, be it ‘Grand Illusion’ or ‘Duck Dynasty.’

Does film music really matter to the average moviegoer? A great score, after all, can’t save a bad film, and a bad score – so it’s said – can’t sink a good one.

At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction.

You’ve probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike.

What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then… it’s gone.

Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it.

A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself.

The contemporary notion that it’s somehow inherently bad for a film to be ‘talky’ has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood.

Most ‘Monty Python’ fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age.

The first play I ever saw – I was in junior high school – was a high school production of Noel Coward’s ‘Blithe Spirit,’ which seemed to me absolutely magical.

The smaller newspapers probably won’t have any critics at all. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing because there’s a certain level of seriousness that you can’t get with a small newspaper for critics.

If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I’m going to run screaming up the aisle.

I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns.

I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people.

Ai Weiwei, who is both a widely admired conceptual artist and a fearless human-rights activist, has been on the bad side of the Chinese government for years.

Maine likes to call itself ‘America’s Vacationland.’ For many artists, though, it’s the office. Since the 19th century, painters from all over the country – including Edward Hopper, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver and Andrew Wyeth – have spent large chunks of time there.

It’s certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they’re required to learn in school is still too much.

No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit.

One reason why Shakespeare’s plays remain so popular is that they’re now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.

There is still a lot to be said for the well-made, witty, clever, three-act comedy.

The ‘Podunk Times’ is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There’s just not enough dance there.

Needless to say, anybody who can stumble through a C-major scale knows that Art Tatum always gave his audiences 10 times their money’s worth.

I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the ’60s and ’70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the ’20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.

Well into the ’40s, it wasn’t uncommon for big-budget Hollywood movies to contain little or no underscoring, and many of today’s directors, following the lead of Martin Scorsese in ‘GoodFellas,’ accompany their films with pop records, not original music.

Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music – including jazz.

What’s the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was ‘Noises Off,’ but now that I’ve seen ‘The Liar,’ I’m not so sure.

Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.