Quotes About Theater

I enjoy making films, but my heart is in the stage. Every night you have to be on. There's no second take.

I like to work. I like to go every night and play a part.

My play opens with an actor walking down into the audience, where he strangles the critic, then reads aloud from a little black book all the humiliations he has noted therein. Then he throws up on the audience, after which he exits and puts a bullet through his head.

I stupidly suggested that we do A Dream Play. There were forty-two parts... It was hell. I thought: 'How can I explain to these forty-two people what Strindberg means by "Poor souls, I feel sorry for us."' It doesn't exist in German.

It is not whether you really cry. It's whether the audience thinks you are crying.

And the real actors look down on those from the drama school and are sure to let them know. They also look down on each other, but that they don't show too much. In any case, there's a hell of a lot of looking down on each other, and everyone thinks they're the only one who's wonderful. And the janitors are the only ones who act like normal people and greet you when you say hello to them.

There's No Business Like Show Business.

For me the whole world is like a gigantic theater in which I am the only spectator without opera glasses. The orchestra plays the prelude to the third act, the stage is far away as in a dream, my heart swells with delight—and you want to blind me with a pair of half-ruble spectacles?

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

Bed is the poor man's opera.

There is nothing more gorgeous than being in a room with a play or watching someone on a stage delineate the human condition.

I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.

I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.

The door was open; I stepped in. A ghost town with a ghost theater, yet the former grandness still evident, the gold wallpaper peeling, the velvet seats in attendant rows, though ripped and ruined. Why did I cry? Not because it was a wreck, but because I felt the history.

Sales and theater have much in common. Both take guts. Salespeople pick up the phone and call strangers; actors walk onto the stage in front of them. Both invite rejection—for salespeople, slammed doors, ignored calls, and a pile of nos; for actors, a failed audition, an unresponsive audience, a scathing review. And both have evolved along comparable trajectories.

Las ventas y el teatro tienen mucho en común. Ambos requieren agallas.

The first time I got recognized in public was at a movie theater. It was at the 'Lord of the Rings' movie premiere. I was at the movie theater, and someone came up, and it was so weird to me, because I had never been recognized by a viewer, so I thought that was scary.

As a viewer, I will go and watch only commercial films.

You can manipulate the viewer in film. With theater, what you see is what you get.

I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.

I think if I hadn't been born in a pit village I'd have been part of a dramatic society.

What I particularly like about Broadway is the camaraderie and the friendship of other people in other shows. Everybody knows you're opening and cares about you. There's a real village atmosphere.

It takes a damn village to get a show on Broadway!

I have always wanted to play the role of a village girl.