Quotations about Cinema, Acting, Theater
The theatre is a bad thing to live on! It gets into one's bones like an illness. One can wash the make-up off one's face, but one gets a theatrical varnish on one's soul, which makes one think of life as a painted cardboard arrangement that is all right as long as it makes a good show, and of God as a kind of huge property man, who is apt to make mistakes with the accessories. ~Anita Vivanti Chartres (1866–1942), The Hunt for Happiness, 1896
What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out. ~Alfred Hitchcock
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. ~John LeCarré, as quoted in Robert Byrne, The Fourth — And By Far the Most Recent — 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, 1990
As a child I was taught that it was bad manners to draw attention to yourself and make a spectacle of yourself. I then went on to make a rather nice living doing just that... I am proud to have been in a business that gives pleasure, creates beauty, and awakens our conscience, arouses compassion, and perhaps most importantly gives millions a respite from our so violent world. ~Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993)
I like the play that does not end. The play whose last act is a beginning. ~Horace Traubel (1858–1919), "Play things xxxviii," review of Minnie Maddern Fiske's Leah Kleshna, in The Conservator, March 1905
The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it. ~Dave Barry,
[It] is a good story before the actors take it. It becomes a better story as the actors pass it along. ~Horace Traubel (1858–1919), "Play things xxxviii," about Minnie Maddern Fiske's Leah Kleshna, in The Conservator, 1905
Dance until your feet hurt. Sing until your lungs hurt. Act until you're William Hurt. ~"Phil's-osophy" by Phil Dunphy (Christopher Lloyd, Steven Levitan, and Dan O'Shannon, Modern Family, "Schooled," original airdate 2012 Oct 10)
Horror films don't create fear. They release it. ~Wes Craven
A soap opera is a television serial about a family that never spends its time watching a television serial. ~20,000 Quips & Quotes, Evan Esar, 1968
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.... Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die.... It is a theater of sacrifice... ~Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, 2006
Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one? ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
We've seen so many detective serials we're beginning to suffer from private eyestrain. ~Arnold H. Glasow (1905–1999)
[Charlie] Chaplin... is the greatest living actor I've seen, and the prime interpreter of the soul imposed upon by modern civilization. ~Hart Crane, 1922
You would go on the stage
With that strange long stride,
Walking as though there were mountains at your side;
Clothed only in the glamour
Of your intensity,
With no claptrap, no clamour,
No make-up, no mummery;
Standing there
With your gray hair—
The mother, the mistress, the wife—
Confessing life
As it is—sordid, insupportable, sublime;
Admitting time
Uncorseted,
With heavy breasts sucking the grief
Of the world, heavier than lead
With late bitter brief
Milk, with heart as dead
But deep as the sea
To drink, to drown all tragedy,
Smiling like death a little wistfully.
~Joseph Auslander, "Letter to Eleonora Duse," 1920s
This wide and universal theatre
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in.
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts...
~William Shakespeare, As You Like It, c.1599
"For any one with true dramatic instincts, it is only the Overture that is ended! The real treat has yet to begin. You go to a theatre, and pay your ten shillings for a stall, and what do you get for your money? Perhaps it's a dialogue between a couple of farmers — unnatural in their overdone caricature of farmers' dress — more unnatural in their constrained attitudes and gestures — most unnatural in their attempts at ease and geniality in their talk. Go instead and take a seat in a third-class railway-carriage, and you'll get the same dialogue done to the life! Front-seats — no orchestra to block the view — and nothing to pay!"...
"I wonder if Shakespeare had that thought in his mind," I said, "when he wrote 'All the world's a stage'?"
The old man sighed. "And so it is," he said, "look at it as you will. Life is indeed a drama; a drama with but few encores — and no bouquets!" he added dreamily. "We spend one half of it regretting the things we did in the other half!"
"And the secret of enjoying it," he continued, resuming his cheerful tone, "is intensity!"
"But not in the modern æsthetic sense, I presume? Like the young lady, in Punch, who begins a conversation with 'Are you intense?'"
"By no means!" replied the Earl. "What I mean is intensity of thought — a concentrated attention. We lose half the pleasure we might have in Life, by not really attending. ~Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, 1889
This world is just a stage, and we
Must do our stunt of comedy,
Or mouth our tragic little book
Till Death shall murmur "Get the hook!"
~James P. Haverson (1880–1954), "Life," Sour Sonnets of a Sorehead & Other Songs of the Street, 1908
Exit, pursued by a bear ~William Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, c.1610
Sometimes I think my life would make a great TV movie. It even has the part where they say, "Stand by. We are experiencing temporary difficulties." ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
An X-rated movie is an underdeveloped plot with an overdeveloped cast. ~Robert Orben, 2100 Laughs For All Occasions, 1983
There's no thief like a bad movie. ~Sam Ewing, as quoted by The Reader's Digest, 2001