Anthony Powell Quotes

All the world's a stage.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mearly players.

Lots of people make the stage and it can seem very violent and over the top, but it's not really. It's always a kind of gentle ballet.

I was into acting as a kid. There was a time when I was 18 that I played the boy in a production of 'Equus' in Oregon, and I thought that was going to be my life.

On the last day of our five-day work week, we did two performances and we had an audience. It was similar to theatre; we went from beginning to end, and it was very pleasing.

It's true: theatre has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I always liked everything about it. As a child, I used to get so excited about performing, I'd get the giggles.

Perhaps because my background is theatrical, I have a great affinity with the classics. Hamlet has always been a character of great interest to me and a character I would really love to play. Or a character in a Tennessee Williams play, maybe Tom in 'The Glass Menagerie.'

There are a lot of different facets to my personality that I don't use all the time in my house, or in everyday life, that I can experience and share when I'm on a stage.

Life is full of ironies and absurdities.

I grew up doing regional Shakespeare, and when Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, there's something about that that you don't really do in film anymore.

I was Jenny in 'Jenny and the School for Cats' when I was five years old. That was my first big break. Then I got to play the Artful Dodger in 'Oliver Twist,' and that was the most fun I've ever had.

I often think a play gets better and better as you hit a stride because you really find new things. One of the great privileges of doing theater is you get so many at-bats - you get to try it eight times a week and every audience is different, everyday is different.

If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

Everyday life is a disaster, and disaster can liberate us.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

I've always been into theater and movies. When I was in school, I did a monologue for my talent show. I would go to the local theater. I was always in dance. I was always performing. That was always my thing.

What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones.

The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville.

There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!

I have mainly been interested in acting. I think it's a great job, a fine way to live your life.

How plotless real life was!

In your everyday life you always have opportunities for enlightenment. If you go to the rest room, there is a chance to attain enlightenment. When you cook, there is a chance to attain enlightenment. When you clean the floor, there is a chance to attain enlightenment.

The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.