Theater

(28 votes)   The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.

Harold Clurman

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(209 votes)   In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822, British Poet

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(152 votes)   Theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.

Antonin Artaud
1896-1948, French Theater Producer, Actor, Theorist

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(144 votes)   I just love, I love, I love movies.

Laura Dern
1967-, American Actress

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(139 votes)   The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Antonin Artaud
1896-1948, French Theater Producer, Actor, Theorist

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(121 votes)   The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

George Santayana
1863-1952, American Philosopher, Poet

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(112 votes)   To treat a ''big'' subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.

Henry James
1843-1916, American Author

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(107 votes)   The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(100 votes)   I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan
1751-1816, Anglo-Irish Dramatist

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(98 votes)   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
1947-, American Playwright

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(89 votes)   If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

James Thurber
1894-1961, American Humorist, Illustrator

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(84 votes)   Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(82 votes)   The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.

Alfred Jarry
1873-1907, French Playwright, Author

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(80 votes)   We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.

Bertolt Brecht
1898-1956, German Dramatist, Poet

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(69 votes)   In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.

J. M. Synge
1871-1909, Irish Poet, Dramatist

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