Theater

About Theater

Inception: 1971

Notable quotes

“What we call theatre doesn’t actually happen on the stage. It happens in the mind of the audience.”
— Ben Abbott, commentary on Backward (2025)
“If you have a message, call western union.”
— The earliest known print attribution is to Moss Hart in Van Wert (Ohio) Times Bulletin (26 August 1954) as cited in Fred Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations (2006). Widely attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, but denied by his biographer, A. Scott Berg, in Goldwyn: A Biography (1998).
“we have to invent new images and ways of power. So far the world thinks of power as violence, that power comes from a gun. We must create a new kind of drama in which there is drama, but it's nonviolent. And this has barely been thought of.”
— 1990 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (1998)
“Acting is merely the art of keeping a large number of people from coughing.”
— Ralph Richardson, reported in Ashton Applewhite; Tripp Evans, Andrew Frothingham (2003). And I Quote: The Definitive Collection of Quotes, Sayings, and Jokes for the Contemporary Speechmaker. Macmillan, p. 283. .
“A playwright is a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.”
— August Strindberg, reported in Colin Jarman (1993). The Book of Poisonous Quotes. McGraw-Hill Professional, p. 103. .
“The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.”
— Quoted in "Tennessee Williams" in Profiles (1990) by Kenneth Tynan (first published as a magazine article in February 1956)

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.