Quotes About Theater

I started out in the Apollo Theater. That's where I got my start. I won Amateur Night four weeks in a row.

Winning the Pulitzer is not that big a deal. I have seen hundreds of plays that have won the prize and you couldn't sit half way through it. The Pulitzer is a common prize that means very little.

In college, I won the Irene Ryan; it's kind of like a collegiate Tony, which got my career going. I was honored. I won a fellowship to the Kennedy Center, and that's where I got my agent.

My first paying gig was a play called 'The Voice of the Prairie' at a theater that no longer exists in Chicago called Wisdom Bridge. I played a fast-talking radio huckster - a salesman of crystal sets in the 1920s - and I actually won an award. Look at that! And then promptly didn't get hired for a year.

And then it was like, wait, you can go to college and study theater? And act in plays? This is almost a racket, you know. And then when the opportunity came along to do it professionally, I thought I'd won the lottery.

I'm an ensemble guy, I guess - that comes from the theater. If I ever won some kind of award someday, I imagine I'd try to be very gracious, but in the end, I just want to keep working. I don't see why that, if you just put your mind to it and keep sowing the right seeds, you can't keep doing the things you want to do.

The '80s were a time of technical wonder in filmmaking; unfortunately, some colleges didn't integrate their film and theater departments - so you had actors who were afraid of the camera, and directors who couldn't talk to the actors.

I wonder what it was like to be an actor years ago. We're so respected now and I don't think it does us any good. We used to be vagabonds. I want to be a vagabond!

As a theater actor I always wondered, 'Is there a place for me in Hollywood?'

I've often wondered, when they've done Of Mice And Men on stage, and I've seen it, how they did that gun thing. I've watched it on stage, but I don't remember it.

I never wondered whether I should be a stage actress or a movie actress.

When I went into 'Fiddler,' I wondered about the response I'd get - the backlash because I'm openly gay. There was none. I toured Canada and America, and not one single review suggested that I played the role gay or that I seemed anything but Tevye.

God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity.

My hero in adulthood would be Michael Bryant, who's dead, bless him. His memory lives on. He was an actor at the National, and a wonderful man.

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.

I've made a wonderful living playing that theatrical character - the professional brassy dame.

I still meet with friends, and I'm enjoying life at 97 here in Palm Springs. They are trying to establish a new theater here in the desert, and if they raise enough money, I understand they might be calling it The Carol Channing Playhouse. Wouldn't that be wonderful? What an honor that would be.

It was a wonderful experience to live the life for a year; to spend all day doing Shakespeare and then do a play in the evening.

Even if it's a wonderful life, you wanna go somewhere and see the way other people reflect on the world and the lives that we're all living... I think regional theater is the life blood of our cultural lives.

I was always interested in storytelling, particularly in theater and film. I liked creative things. My mom and dad are wonderful people, but both are tone deaf, so I don't know where the gene came from.

I prefer theater, but I love to do films, and I prefer theater primarily because I've done more. I know less about movies. You can't lie in either medium. The wonderful thing is that the camera, just like an audience, is made out of skin - because celluloid is skin.

Audiences aren't going to get rid of me. One thing I can say, with absolute certainty, is that my shows will still be performed when I'm dead, buried and forgotten. They're going to absolutely outlive me, which is a wonderful thing to think about.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to make fun of yourself and to do it in a way that sort of preserves your dignity but, at the same time, lets you play the theater of the absurd.

The wonderful thing about Food for Thought is that it lets you keep your hand in theater and be in front of a live audience without a commitment of six months, or even three months.