Famous Theater Quotes

Thoughts and Quotations About Theater's Joy, Meaning, and Importance

© Terah Talley

Oct 14, 2009

The theater has been a place for people to gather and experience together the joys, triumphs, and sorrows life has to offer through storytelling. Every production offers something to the audience, a lesson, catharsis, or simple enjoyment.

The audience at a live theater event has the opportunity to connect to the actors in a real way, feeling their pain and joy. It is no wonder that millions of souls are touched by the art of theater each year. Here are a few quotes by famous actors, directors, and playwrights that discuss their feelings and thoughts about the world of theater.

Quotes About Theater

• "You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you." - Ben Kingsley (English actor. 1966-present)
• "Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater." - W.R. Inge (English author. 1860-1954)
• "In today's world, everything seems like some sort of long audition." - Bob Fosse (American choreographer and director. 1927-1987)
• "The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life." - Arthur Miller (American playwright. 1915-2005)
• "In the theater the audience wants to be surprised but by things that they expect." - Tristan Bernard (French playwright. 1866-1947)
• "A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten." - David Mamet (American playwright. 1947-present)
• "Consider the public. Treat it with tact and courtesy. It will accept much from you if you are clever enough to win it to your side. Never fear it nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then, if you must, make it laugh, make it cry and make it think, but above all, dear pioneers, in spite of indiscriminate and largely ignorant critical acclaim, in spite of awards and prizes and other dubious accolades, never never never bore the living [heck] out of it" - Noel Coward (English actor,director, and playwright. 1899-1973)
• "By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may open up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings." - Arthur Miller (American playwright. 1915-2005)
• "Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live." - Shelley Winters (American actress. 1920-2006)
• "The theater is one of the most expressive and useful vehicles for the edification of a country's people, and a barometer that marks the country's greatness or declines. A sensitive theater... can alter a people's sensibility in just a few years, while a decadent theater where hooves have taken the place of wings can cheapen and lull to sleep an entire nation." - Frederico Garcia Lorca (Spanish poet, dramatist, and theater director. 1898-1936)

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