Eugene Ionesco Quotes

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair

As an actor, I feel like youre asked to live life as vibrantly as possible.

I think the great thing about theatre, and if you start in theatre, is that it does build a confidence in poetic themes and ideas.

The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda.

It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.

I knew I wanted it to be a piece of theatre rather than just a concert.

When you are in a good theatre show, it is a wonderful and very fulfilling experience, entertaining a large audience and their showing their appreciation for your efforts.

The big catalyst was seeing my sister, when I was 11, doing a dramatic recital. When I saw her on the stage and everyone listening to her so patiently, quietly, that's all I wanted: for someone to look at me and listen to me, but in some beautiful and artistic way.

Acting has been my lover and best friend. My confidant and my tormentor. It has given me support and broken my heart and mended it.

I mean there’s a certain finality about a movie, when it’s done it’s done – that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There’s a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can’t do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participateI respond to heat. And blood. And humanity. The cold experience is not for me. I’ve always enjoyed all the real people in a room together in the theatre.

There's nothing that compares to watching that final of Charles Mee’s 'The Glory of the World' play at BAM17 to 20 minute sequence in one sitting. It fills you with a giddy energy watching that. Then, being gifted with the silence that follows...I've never had a theatrical experience like that before, I'm sure.

Acting is kind of a calling for me so I'm just happy to be there and do great work.

All the world's a stage.

Peter Sarsgaard, he's an extraordinary actor, and I would say that Peter has really brought into my life and my sister's life a sense of presence as an actor that I never really understood or knew about until I met him. They've been together for a very long time, and he introduced me to the idea of the presentation.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.

I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.

You know, you should start to be in plays and things like that. Write some scripts. If you're an artist and you truly don't believe what you're spittin' then you need to really seriously be an actor then.

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

A good play is a play which when acted upon the boards make an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play.

I don't see why people want new plays all the time. What would happen to concerts if people wanted new music all the time?

To me, the theatre - I don't like to say it, but I'll say it - is a temple in a kind of way, where human beings go to be elevated.