Theater Life Quotes

In the theater, you get very close with everyone, and you have to because you're with each other all the time. I respect it. It's a challenge, but it's very worth the hard work.

I admire anyone who does stage all their life. It's so tough, and it also made me really appreciate how lucky I am with film. You have to do your own makeup with stage, and you have to do so many un-glamorous things.

I always assumed I'd spend my life happily performing in artsy-fartsy little theaters.

My whole background, my whole life was just lots and lots of theater, a lot of that being musical theater.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

I loved being a film executive. But something was always missing for me. I always had the feeling that I was looking over my shoulder - what's going on on Broadway?

I think I find it easier to live on the stage than in life.

...and there I suddenly found my articulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that's when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor?

I love getting back to Wivenhoe. I get out of my wig, bustle and costume in three minutes flat at the end of the play before jumping into a taxi outside the theater and catching the train home.

Now I'm back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that.

You're going from audition to audition, changing in the backseat, and all that fun stuff that's great to do at one time in your life. That's when the 49-cent taco, as disgusting as it is, really plays into your day. It really helps you out.

You know, theater is either heaven or hell. There's no middle.

Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly.

We did a different show every night. We'd open a show, and then two weeks later we'd open the next show. And two weeks later we'd open the third show until we had all eight running. And it was just one of the richest experiences I'd ever had in my theatrical life.

Theater is the foundation of how I live my life, actually. My father was a playwright, so I was around it all the time and loved to talk shop with him, just loved it. And basically everything that I hold to be good and true and worthy, I learned in the theater. So not even just about the work, but just about life. Discipline, problem solving, creativity, how to get along with people.

My father calls acting 'a state of permanent retirement with short spurts of work.'

Like most actors, I've always been grateful for Chinese restaurants; they were often the only places that stayed open late enough for performers to get hot food after the show.

I have lived my whole life on the stage and screen before you. I found purpose and meaning in your response.

I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater.

All I wanted was to be a regional-theater actor, to be in a company. I thought it would be a great life. I don't think I understood how difficult it would be.

I was a backstage kid. I was in the wings looking out.

Being an actor is just kind of embarrassing.

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

I really prefer the actual experience of being onstage and living the character from beginning to end with the energy of the audience. There's nothing that beats that feeling, and yet I really have trouble with the eight shows a week.

Theater is structured. You're plugged into a system. It's relentless. You're expected to do certain things every day. You have your tasks.