Marcel Marceau Quotes

Theater publicly reveals the human condition through appealing to both intellect and emotion. Architecture, whether lowly or exalted, can do the same.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

Acting is an opportunity for me to try to explore and examine and expose humanity's weaknesses that are intrinsic to our nature as humans and learn from them; thereby, it's like a sociological expose.

No reasonable man would think more highly of himself because he has office or power in this world; he is no more than a prisoner whom the chief gaoler has set over his fellow-prisoners, until the executioner's cart comes for him too.

Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.

Acting, for me, is not an end in itself. It's more a means to asking the questions I'm obsessed with about life.

Actors, who have no real sense of who they are or what they want, have long known that not just their gender but every aspect of their identity is on a spectrum. They can be anything they are asked to be. They aspire to a protean state, shape-shifting like high summer clouds.

Why do we write novels or make television about real things? It's the human condition and human suffering.

In acting, you have a writer, a director, a character - you're working through being another person - and the irony I always tell people is when I acted early on as a teenager, it actually kept me out of trouble.

There was a time during 'Gone Girl' that I'd come home, and I'd say, 'I get to be every part of being a woman in this role.' For me, I feel it much more as a springboard for the work I'm going to take on thereafter.

Literature hasn't come up with any new themes. The literature of all different times - it's still dealing with how one resolves issues of existence.

Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.

My standup is years and years of me working things out on the road. I'm really proud of it! A lot of it is about, well... I don't know why I feel this way, but I feel like every special or show I do is some variation on how I feel like I'm not a girl, not yet a woman.

The art of what they call female impersonation, or the drag shows, really helped me to hone what type of woman I was.

If I look at who I am as a person and where my interests lie, I figured that going from Tommy End to Aleister Black was almost like a possession. So, one entity to the other.

What I like and find liberating in dialogue comedy is that the characters, and what they say, are not me. These are fleeting thoughts and observations and not presented as truths but as something that illuminates the character and the dynamic between the characters. This kind of dialogue is thesis and antithesis - and we never get to a synthesis.

Literature plays a huge role in examining difficult real-life issues.

Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture.

We all turn into something different, I'm just glad that I'm aware that I've had this alter ego since I was five years old and thankfully it hasn't got me into too much trouble.

My desire to be an actor or a model precedes my identity.

I was no one, nobody from Nowheresville, until I became a drag queen.

Before stand-up, I'm not sure I even had a point of view.

Theater, for me, is no longer a conversation about how we destroy each other; it's much more about how we may be destroying everyone else.

When I first started out, all I thought about was my own acting.