Theater Quotes

It's not like I had big dreams to go to California and become an actor. I loved doing my shows at school and community theater, and I probably would have settled in New York because it was closer. I was going to go to NYU.

The adrenaline of a live performance is unlike anything in film or theater. I can see why it's so addictive.

Corporate Hollywood thinks I'm a geek to go back and do theater. They don't understand why I don't want to be a movie star, why I'm not pursuing Mel Gibson's roles.

Sometimes I have a great day of filming and sometimes the theater strikes me better. It just depends.

I think if my daughter was interested in acting, I would find ways for her to act in theater that has to do with her school or a kids' improvisational thing. There are ways to do it where you're not on a movie set with 60 adults, which I loved at the time, but as a parent, I don't know that I'd be dying to put her in that spot.

I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater.

What I'd really like to do is do a film or two a year and then do theater in New York the rest of the year.

Encouragement from my high school teacher Patty Hart said 'you need to focus and theater might be your route out of here.' I created the program, went to college and graduate school and now here I am.

I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there's more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy.

My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.

You go to a theater now and you literally see parents watching the movie and they suddenly cover their kid's ears. I figured I'd make one movie where they didn't have to do this.

For me, art is always a kind of theater.

So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.

I don't think about going back to the theater.

I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there.

I would be a terrible person to be in a relationship with because I'm either sleeping or at the theater.

The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

At one time musical theater, particularly in the '40s and '50s, was a big source of pop songs. That's how musical theater started, really - it was just a way of linking several pop songs for the stage.

Any show that's bringing in a young audience is doing a good thing, because that's the only way that theater will continue to grow. All the other audience members are going to be dead soon!

In the theater, as an actor, you're welcoming people into your house.

Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.

I knew there was something special about the theater for me something beyond the regular reality, something that I could get into and transcend and become something other than myself.

I did a lot of theater in college, and I knew that not many people make it, but I just figured, 'Well, I really want to try acting while I'm young, and I don't ever want to look back and say that I never gave it a try.' I fully figured I'd be back in grad school - probably for psychology.

I did a lot of theater in the South side of Chicago.

I believe that no matter what you do in life, if you learn the basics through theater, it will help you in everything else - problem solving, communication, discipline, all of that stuff.

I've always just gone with the best role, and I don't care if it's in theater, film or television.