All the World's a Stage

All the world 's a stage, 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)

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. (Oscar Wilde)

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. (Stella Adler)

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists. (Stephen Sondheim)

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience. (Andy Goldsworthy)

Film is fragmented and gets into lots of other people's hands. There are a lot of pleasures that theatre gives me. You get to perform uninterrupted. (Willem Dafoe)

The best audience is one that is intelligent, well educated - and a little drunk. (Vice President Alben W. Barkley)

My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive. (Gwyneth Paltrow)

The reason why I hate working in theatre is the tedium of memorization. But once that is done, then you feast on this never-ending meal. If you play it correctly, every night is fraught with very high stakes that are very difficult to find in everyday life. (Christopher Meloni)

I think theatre is by far the most rewarding experience for an actor. You get 4 weeks to rehearse your character and then at 7:30 pm you start acting and nobody stops you, acting with your entire soul. (Christopher Eccleston)

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession. (Katherine Hepburn)

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed. (Edward Bond)

With a theatre audience there's always the additional sense of a sustained challenge of which I'm acutely aware and for which you need to have the tools ready - your voice, physicality, brain. (Greta Scacchi)

What draws me to the theatre... is that you have no idea what's going to happen. That's the most exciting part of theatre, it's never the same. If it were, it would be like watching a movie. (Lusia Strus)

For me, making films is like being on vacation, it's a nice walk. But theatre is like mountaineering: you never know whether you're going to fall off or make it to the top. (Isabelle Huppert)

Acting is the easiest money you'll ever make in your life, and directing is probably the hardest money. (Charles S. Dutton)

Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. You're doing the same thing: You're reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, that's exactly like people I know. (Jonathan Miller)

Casting is 65 percent of directing. (John Frankenheimer)

Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots. (John Crowley)

I am drawn to writing and directing as it is most like the feeling I had when I was a teenager with my puppet theatre. You are more in control of everything and involved in every aspect of production, so more challenged and fulfilled. (Richard E. Grant)

I mean, if you are directing actors to do one thing and then directing them to do something else entirely because the one thing you wanted them to do may not work, then you are just shattering their confidence in the project. (Atom Egoyan)

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it. (John Huston)

The more decisions you make, the better, statistically, your odds of success are. And what I also learned was, it doesn't matter: anything can be fixed. When you're directing, you can agonize, but you can't indulge. Stuff has to happen. (Tony Goldwyn)

Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four. (Katherine Hepburn)

Well, actors get very frustrated with giving control to other people. They have their own ideas and wants for their characters. Warren Beatty once told me that he thought actors ended up directing out of frustration. If you have a strong sense of how to communicate a film, you should direct. The problem is that it is a huge commitment. I'd rather direct a play than a film due to the time. A movie can tie you up for a year or more. (Alec Baldwin)

You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows. (Louis Malle)

I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance. (Sam Mendes)

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. (Billy Wilder)

We're tightrope walkers. When you walk the wire in a movie, the wire is painted on the floor, but when you walk it on the stage, it's a hundred feet high without a net. (Al Pacino)

Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult. (Laurence Olivier)

It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true. (Woodrow Wilson, on seeing D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation)