Theater Quotes

For me, I've always wanted to do theater, so I gravitate toward it.

I will never leave the theater. My heart is there and I love being on stage eight times a week.

One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.

I did theater for a few years while I was in New York, but it was tough having to perform scripts worse than what I knew I could write.

When you go to the theater, if you're really involved in the play, you don't think about it - you're in it.

Anyone can do theater, even actors. And theater can be done everywhere. Even in a theater.

I love working in the theater.

Theater actors like to change character roles. They don't like to always do the same thing.

I made theater very important in the beginning of my career.

You want people to identify with the person on the screen or in the theater, but you don't want them to identify with you as a person.

Theater to me is acting but it's more real on film.

I used to do community theater with Conor Oberst.

I've made six films since I made Secrets and Lies but I still live in London and I'd love to do theater.

Producers want to put their music behind revivals but I don’t think that’s a good trend for the theater at all.

The only thing that I can do is hold a mirror in front of men and women, in front of the viewer in the theater, to reflect. There is nothing but reflection that I could intend to offer the viewer of the film.

It's something I want to do going forward - make a movie that is commercial and universal and will play in any movie theater or living room in the States or the UK, but is definitively Canadian. I don't think there's such a thing as prohibitively Canadian.

I really am a theater person. That means you put something out there, and you let it go. Tomorrow night is a new performance.

You have to transmit to them what its like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

I'd much rather see Richard Pryor or Jackie Mason in a theater than in a club.

When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But we're trained so much in pure, realistic theater that it's difficult for us to handle things on two levels at the same time.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

Cary Grant was wonderful to work with on stage. He would move downstage, so that as he looked at me the audience had to look at me, too. He knew a lot about the theater and how to move around. He was very secure.

I went to a college in New York called New Paltz. I studied theater there for four years. I also studied privately in NYC with a teacher named Robert X. Modica.

One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious.

Well, in the theater, I think you're actually more responsible for what is going on onstage as a director than you are in film.

The last thing in the world I should have done was go into the theater because was inordinately shy as a young man. I couldnt open my mouth. At a party, I was the one stuck up against the wall. I was embarrassed about talking. I felt that I couldnt talk well.

I'm from the theater, darling. I want to know what happens at the end.

I'm in a very good place now because I do theater, I do TV and I make movies. I was a dancer, so I dance a little bit. I was a musician, so I do a little bit of music. And I do all of this in four or five different languages, and all over the world.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Certainly people are always very envious of me. When I join a new theater company, the other actors look down the program, see my Return of the Jedi credit and say, 'Oh, you were part of Star Wars.' I smile and say, 'Yes, but only for twenty-six and a half seconds.'

In high school I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. And this is like Fame. It's like that sort of prototypical, dancers in the hallway, theater students, musical students, art geeks. And it was a kindergarten in the truest sense of the world: a children's garden where I was able to sort of really come into myself as an artist, as a person, sexuality issues - like, all of this became something where there was a firming-up and a knowing that went on.

There is definitely a correlation between theater and wedding fashion.

There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.

When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It's interesting that once I moved to TV, I'm playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.

If I were to just focus on stand-up, I could actually, paradoxically enough, be home way more, because I would leave on a Friday, go do a couple theaters Friday, Saturday, maybe Sunday, come home.

Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single ‘victim’ of Columbine?

I grew up in a theater family. My father was a regional theater classical repertory producer. He created Shakespeare festivals. He produced all of Shakespeare's plays, mostly in Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. One of them, the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, is still going. So I grew up not wanting to be an actor, not wanting to go into the family business.

While the storytelling in games is getting so much better, you look at something like Grand Theft Auto V, which I thought was really beautifully written, it doesn't really need a movie because it is a movie. So I think you need a unique game - you either need an incredibly talented writer and director to come in and put together an amazing vision, or you need a game like Metal Gear, which is very cinematic, has a huge amount of history behind it, but whose cinematic experience is very different from what you'd get in a theater.

Now with digital, we have much better projection, and if the theaters are charging higher prices but providing refreshments and a clean, well-lit theater, there's no reason why this cannot go on as a senior-citizen-driven business for years. Especially with movies for adults.

Film and television is just a different technique in terms of how to approach the camera but basically the job is the same; but what you learn as a craft in theater, you can then learn to translate that into any mediums.

I didn't want to do film or commercials or television. That was cheap. That was selling out. I was the classic liberal, left-wing, 'Theater is going to change the world' kind of person. You know, very, very boring.

I not only loved studying theater, I loved being a theater major. It gave me an excuse to brood, to grow a beard, to wear black 'at' people. I didn't just want to play Hamlet, I wanted to be Hamlet.

I grew up in music theater playing to the audience - singing and dancing and showing off. That's really my background. But the camera's different. I think I'm more at home on stage.

The award is important in order to bring people to the movie theater. That's the only principle meaning of any award.

I'd forgotten how arrogant people are in the theater, I'm agreeing to starve for a year and he seems to think I should be pleased to have the part.

Jordan [Ruddes], he learned that way, and that's what he knows how to do. That's how he kind of approaches all music, whether it's to learn a cover song that we're going to play, or to review Dream Theater music - he always uses charts. That's what he knows. I really rely a lot more on memory.

That's one of the things about theater vs. film - with theater, actors have a little more control, and one of the disappointing things about films is that once you're done shooting, anything can happen, you know?

Going to the theater or having the honor of performing in theater reminds you of your humanity in a very different way. It's a real release and an incredible challenge. But the stage is a dangerous place. You gotta be trained. Plus, crowds like when things go wrong. I think that's part of the thrill. Anything can happen.

Typically, among the audience members joining the actors, the director, Ann Ciccolella and myself, about half of these theater goers have read the novel [Anthem], and half have not read it. That is interesting.

Each day, I read the New York Times before leaving for the theater. And I have this standing assignment: connect the world of Anthem to the late breaking events of the day.