John Lahr Quotes

If these theatres didn't exist, the tradition of British theatre would cease to exist.

Whether that's positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theater again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate.

Representative institutions are as much a part of the true Briton as his language and his literature.

Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?

All the arts are predominantly national, and therefore the Australian Film Commission should be funding us. The battle gets more and more vicious each year.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

The Old Vic has always been first and foremost an actors' theatre, a home for great talent and memorable performances.

The thing is this: I've got an amazing career in England that couldn't possibly get much better. I do the best theater around, I work at the National Theater, the Old Vic - which I'm sure you've heard of because it's the one Kevin Spacey runs - and I play the most amazing roles and work with the most amazing directors.

Theatres, along with the likes of the Ulster Orchestra, for example, are the cultural heartbeats of our towns and cities, and without them, we are much poorer for it.

I think cinema is the memory and the imagination of the country. Take the memory and imagination out of an individual, and he stops being an individual. I think it's the same thing for a country.

The BBC is the greatest broadcaster in the world. It's the standard that everyone measures themselves against. If we lose the BBC, it won't be quite as bad as losing the royal family, but an integral part of this country will have gone. But then, I'm an old guy.

When the culture dies, the country dies.

We want American customs, habits, manners, dress, manufactures, modes of thought, modes of expression, and language. We should encourage national and even State peculiarities; for there are peculiarities and differences in the wants and situations of all people, that require provincial and national, not cosmopolitan, institutions and productions.

… perhaps we are awakening to the realization that if individuals can no longer patronize the arts in the way they did in the old days, we may come to a time where the public will undertake to do this for its own pleasure and profit.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

If a nation allows its literary culture to die, it's a sign that it doesn't fundamentally care.

Forgetting the importance of national landscapes, cultures, national behaviours, reactions, and reflexes is a big, big mistake.

We must protect our history - because we are doomed to repeat it if we don't understand it and work towards a more perfect union.

The BBC is a huge part of the nation's cultural life.

The British Museum was our first real museum, the property of the public rather than the monarch or the church.

Antiques Roadshow' is a public service. It reflects the nation back to itself, as does 'Question Time.'

I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.

We had our British background of traditional theatre behind us.

The basis of national identity is to say, "This is authentic to me or my forebears," and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I'm working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who's looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.