Antonin Artaud Quotes

Everything is theater.

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.

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

I've always said I prefer theater, but there's only ever been one play that I really loved doing, and that was The Seagull.

Acting has been described as farting about in disguise.

I don't think musicals are my thing. I'm not a big fan. Definitely have to get on the stage and do something like a straight play.

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive.

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.

Performing in a live theater is absolutely unbeatable. It is something I have done my entire life and have a gift, it seems, for sharing thoughts live.

I think that's the best way to see things, especially this kind of play where there's no pyrotechnics, it's literally just people talking.

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.

All the world's a stage.

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.

[Theater] has always been a big focus. I have been away from it for the past few years. I want to get back to it!

I'm a firm believer in the idea that theater excels over film and TV in its ability to let people play with poetry.

Theater is the best. That's where you get the work done. You just really get in there and figure something out about a story or a character or life or the world. That's where magic stuff happens.

The theater is a need for me. It's a terrible attraction, something I'm compelled to do. And one derives a form of nourishment from the theater which you can never get from films. Making films weakens you in some way. With the theater, the work itself is a regenerative process.

Without acting, I cannot breathe.

I love acting and I love it in all its different manifestations.

Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.

Sometimes we feel like life is like theater, really.

From the time that I was in high school, my life really revolved around live theater, so it almost feels genetic.

Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.