Dramatic Art Quotes

The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.

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

I am in awe of Ruth Draper.

I stopped being interested in improvisation, and I continue to not be that interested in it. Comedians can do it on a different level because they have a goal, but if you're improvising something that's dramatic, there's not that much to be good at.

Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.

Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.

The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration.

When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.

While I was trying to save money to go to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Australia I ended up getting all of this experience which meant that by the time I had enough money in the bank to go to school I didn't really need to go to school anymore.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

I'm aware of other artists, but what I'm really most interested in is viewing individual pictures. I like dramatic pictures.

The most lively fancy aided by the strongest description cannot equal the reality of the opera.

I find myself gravitating towards drama. It interests me. In the books I read, the paintings I like, it's always the darker stuff.

Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it's good storytelling.

Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time - very inspiring and dramatic.

The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province ofwoman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman.

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.

I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation.

To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.

It's a living, breathing thing, acting.

I don't know why every actor doesn't do more plays.

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.

Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.