Catherine Keener Quotes

For me, because I've had classical theater training, when people say, "Oh, my god, the play is amazing!," I'll never get to see it because I'm in it.

I'm just a stage actor from Chicago.

I started off in theater; I did exclusively theater for four or five years. In the last few years, television has come along but I can still make film. I feel very privileged that I can move between them.

Happy Ending I did with Paul Winfield. There was a play- within- the- play and I was his mother - which is a peculiar bit of casting, to say the least.

I was really looking forward to doing the thing that I do - I basically appear just at the beginning and at the end of the 'The Glory of the World' play - but when I got to opening night, I started to get really sad that that was the last time I was going to see the play as a spectator without actually being in it.

I started directing out of necessity, the first play I wrote in college because I didn't know anyone who could direct it.

I certainly did plays in high school and community theater, and I want to get back on the stage.

Theater is a really exciting place to return to all the time because it's incredible training for an actor.

I did a couple of plays in junior high school, maybe high school, and then I did a play in college.

I always did plays, I got the comedic roles in college ... or, uh, the ones that would get naked.

John Cassavetes was a year ahead of me but we met there. What you do when you are at a school for drama, you do a play as opposed to a final. Anyone who wanted to come could just come. So he came, and I can't remember the name of the play, of course, it was a long time ago.

I think in any form of acting, you're always well served if you've done theater.

I would advise young aspiring theater artists to do as many shows as possible. It doesn't matter if it's in the basement of a church, in school, or in community theater. Do them wherever you can; big parts or small, it doesn't matter.

I've been performing my whole life. My mom signed me up for a theater program when I was five - I was the evil queen in 'Once Upon a Mattress.'

I was only in one play at Steppenwolf, in the early days.

I did a lot of Shakespeare touring when I was in college in Montana.

While I was at NYU, I did a play at The Public called 'The Forbidden City,' where I went in as an understudy and got my Equity card.

Doing theater makes you feel like a real actor.

My mother took my brother and I to a production of 'The Tempest', and it was in this very small - it could have been the basement of a church or a black box. The space was vast, but there were maybe 15 seats in the middle. Ariel came out wearing a nude sparkly thong and spike heels, and the muses had these gossamer see-through gowns on.

It meant so much to me as a kid to see professional theater and hear Shakespeare's words.

I was kind of lucky that I had done so much theater over the years, because basically a sitcom is kind of like a hybrid between a film and a play.

I did it once in high school - I was Sandy in Grease - and I decided then that I would never do it again. I've felt that way for years, and that's no bullshit.

I was in college, I thought I was going to be a lawyer, I met this girl named Laura who was the most beautiful girl I had ever known, and she was taking an acting class, so I decided to take the same acting class. And I was a terrible actor in college.

Something like the alleyway scene, where it's like a mini one-act play and you run the whole 18 pages of it, it's so much easier to get lost in it. That's why actors love doing theater so much, I guarantee you. It's refreshing to be able to do something where you don't have to be stopped every two seconds, and you can just play it out and it's done.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.