Quotes
"There's my life. I am the one who prompts success form the shadows.
Roxane -- That's been my life -- to remain earthbound, muttering in the shadows,
while others have found my way to the stars -- to the kiss -- to fame. There's
your pure justice. So put this in your books: Moliére had genius-- and Christian
good looks."
--Cyrano De Bergerac -- Edmund Rostand
"I didn't go to the moon, I went much farther; for time is the longest
distance between two places."
-- The Glass Menagerie --
Tennessee Williams
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances"
-- William Shakespeare
"An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow "
-- Edwin
Booth
"For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your Candles,
Laura -- and so goodbye..."
-- The Glass Menagerie -- Tennessee Williams
"Actors are the only honest hypocrites"
-- William Hazlitt
"A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play
and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good"
--T. S. Eliot
"Imagination is more important than knowledge"
-- Albert
Einstein
"Theater going is a communal act, movie going a solitary one."
~ Robert Brustein
"By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play
is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may
be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man.
Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to
know more, and not merely to spend our feelings."
~ Arthur Miller
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential
is invisible to the eye."
-- The Little Prince ~Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create
the universe"
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
"If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended: That
you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear; And this weak and
idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend. If you
pardon, we will mend."
-- Puck, A Midsummers Night's Dream
William Shakespeare
"If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it that,
surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. That strain again, it had a
dying fall. "
-- The Twelfth Night -- William Shakespeare
"The world's not so crazy... it's the people in it. Life is kind of
beautiful if you just relax"
-- Martin Vanderhof, You can't
take it with you --Hart and Kaufman
"The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is
also the return of art to life."
-- Oscar Wilde
"A play is fiction-and fiction is fact distilled into truth."
-- Edward Albee
"I speak my own sins-- I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for
it."
--The Crucilble --Arthur Miller
"Dear George, Remember no man is a failure who has friends. Thanks
for the wings, Clarence"
-- It's a Wonderful Life -- Philip
Van Doren Stern
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because
he hears a different drummer."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford
to let alone."
--Henry David Thoreau
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18"
-- Albert Einstein
"...it is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is
the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position,
and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind."
-- The Importance of Being Earnest -- Oscar Wilde
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it
is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."
--
Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not
bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
-- Mark Twain
"I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter
how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the
ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary
things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane."
--
Dracula -- Bram Stoker
"A man can't turn tail and run just because a little personal risk
is involved. What did Shakespeare say? 'Cowards die a thousand deaths, the brave
man... only 500?' "
--The Music Man Meredith Willson
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk"
-- Thomas Edison
"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new
deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to
offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new
deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet,
because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full
of cider."
--Guys and Dolls- Frank Loesser
"I'm gonna hit the ground. I try to keep thinking but I'm gonna hit
the ground anyway."
-- Rain Garry Williams
"It takes strong men and women to love ... people strong enough inside
themselves to love ... without humiliation."
--Dr. Lyman, Bus Stop ~William Inge
"In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at
heart."
~Anne Frank
" A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind."
--
Eugene Ionesco
"When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams."
-- Anton Chekhov
"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he
made school boards."
-- Mark Twain
"If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door"
--
Paul Beatty
"We are all of us invented. We are all of us cobbled together from cartilage
and dust. Few of us know with certainty the name of our maker. But I do... Bram
Stoker."
--Steven Dietz ~DRACULA
"There are dark imaginings in this world. And a Foe -- when
vanquished -- is gone from sight... A fear -- once rooted in
your mind -- is yours forever."
--Steven Dietz ~DRACULA
"It's a muzzle for your sheep so you'll never need to worry about your flower
anymore. But, he of course was to far away to hear. It's such a secret place
-- the land of tears."
"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
-- Samuel Beckett,
Waiting for Godot
"Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four letter words writing prose
Anything goes."
-- Cole Porter Anything Goes
"Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve
life before we can hope to improve theater."
~William Inge
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls
the past."
-- George Orwell
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to
time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."
-- Truman Capote
"Instead of a trap door, what about a trap window? The guy looks out it,
and if he leans too far, he falls out. Wait. I guess that's like a regular window."
-- Jack Handey
"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
-- B F Skinner
"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life
is made of."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of
a poet."
-- Orson Wells
"I am a part of all that I have seen."
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson
"I can live for two months on a good compliment."
-- Mark Twain
"It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."
-- Mark Twain
"Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try."
-- Yoda
"So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect,
that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation." -- Billy Wilder
"Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"Applaud friends, the comedy is over."
-- last words of Ludwig van Beethoven
"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate
with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong.
Because someday in your life you will have been all of these."
--George Washington Carver
"My only regret in the theatre is that I could never sit out front and watch
me."
-- John Berrymore
"If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play
needs no epilogue."
-- William Shakespeare As You Like It (Rosalind at epilogue)
"Working in the theatre has a lot in common with unemployment. "
-- Arthur Gingold
"You need three things in the theatre--the play, the actors and the audience,--and
each must give something."
-- Kenneth Haigh
"A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself."
-- Jean Anouilh
"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding
some of your own experience."
-- Paul Newman
"Without acting I cannot breathe."
-- Sir Laurence Olivier
"If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent."
-- Thornton Wilder
"There are no small parts. Only small actors."
-- Milan Kundera
"I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and
am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about
something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai."
-- Orson Welles
"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
"I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods,
feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare. An actor must act."
-- Sir Laurence Olivier
"Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is 50 percent
of the performance."
-- Shirley Booth
"Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The
principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis."
-- Marlon Brando
"I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be
treated like cattle."
-- Alfred Hitchcock
"An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or
two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents."
-- Alec Guinness
"Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing."
-- Ralph Richardson
"Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask.
Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself."
-- Rodney Dangerfield
"An actor's a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening."
-- Marlon Brando
"In the theater the audience wants to be surprised but by things that they
expect"
-- Tristan Bernard
"I love acting. It is so much more real than life."
-- Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper.
He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a
terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be
allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally
be paid to such a person."
-- Linda, Death of a Salesman --Arthur Miller
"This is Buffalo, New York. It's like. Scranton without the charm."
-- Ken Ludwig, Moon Over Buffalo
"Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab
an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion
which you could observe and walk away from."
--Arthur Miller
"What? Bad news in this company? The House of Usher Repertory Theatre?"
-- Ken Ludwig, Moon Over Buffalo
"Do you see what I mean?! About the theater?! I'm back here for three hours
and I'm acting like a lunatic. I'll be in analysis till I'm a hundred"
-- Ken Ludwig, Moon Over Buffalo
"It's only theatre until it offends someone … then it's ART !"
"What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality
involvement."
-- Edward Albee
"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination
on the alter of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having
worthless dreams."
-- Yann Martel from Life of Pi
"Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners."
--Jimmy Stewart
"It's well done if you can do a part and not have the acting show."
--Jimmy Stewart
"You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop
a bag of tricks. Always be yourself."
--Jimmy Stewart
"You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand."
-- Leonardo da Vinci
"There is no crime greater, or more worthy of punishment, than being strange
and frightened among the strange and frightened; except assimilation to the
end of becoming strange and frightened, but apart from ones own real self."
-- Israel Horovitz
"A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong -- if there is any
root to life -- because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live
in the same place for very long. Dislocation, maybe, is part of our uneasiness.
It implants the feeling that nothing is really permanent."
-- Arthur Miller
"Arthur Miller once payed me a great compliment saying that my plays were
'necessary.' I will go one step further and say that Arthur's plays are 'essential.'"
-- Edward Albee
"...and private misfortunes make the public good, so that the more private
misfortunes there are, the more everything is well."
-- Voltaire Candide
"'Do you think,' said Candide, 'that men have always massacred each other,
as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak,
flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody,
backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?'"
-- Voltaire, Candide
"I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle class morality."
-- George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion
"If you can't appreciate what you've got, you'd better get what you can
appreciate."
-- George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion
"I am not an animal! I am a human being! I... am... a man!"
-- Bernard Pomerance, THE ELEPHANT MAN
"...sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams."
-- Bernard Pomerance, THE ELEPHANT MAN
"What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say
the word, and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down."
-- It's A Wonderful Life
"Acting is happy agony."
-- Alec Guinness
"The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster."
-- Oscar Wilde
"When [actors] are talking, they are servants of the dramatist. It is what
they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor."
-- Cedric Hardwicke
"I don't believe in astrology. The only stars I can blame for my failures
are those that walk about the stage."
-- Noel Coward
"I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as
you may have noticed, I have no hair."
-- Patrick Stewart
"When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's
in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?, ' I say, 'Your salary.'"
-- Alfred Hitchcock
"That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance;
to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To
spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the
mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know-- that's the happy
existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness."
-- Simon Stimson in Our Town by Thornton Wilder
"Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of
nonsense."
--Thornton Wilder (1897 - 1975), Our Town
"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole
book."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Listen to the stage manager and get on stage when they tell you to.
No one has time for the rock star act. None of the techs backstage care if you're
David Bowie or the milkman. When you act like a jerk, they are completely unimpressed
with the infantile display that you might think comes with your dubious status.
They were there hours before you building the stage, and they will be there
hours after you leave tearing it down. They should get your salary, and you
should get theirs."
-- Lollapalooza Alumni Henry Rollins
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
-- Walter Elias Disney
If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but
faults, failures and so on,
but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.
~Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
"The mind's the standard of the man"
-- Bernard Pomerance, THE ELEPHANT MAN
"Never, no, never... nothing dies.
The stream flows, the wind blows,
cloud fleets, the heart beats.
Nothing will die."
-- Bernard Pomerance, THE ELEPHANT MAN
"[The earth] smells like a million years ago and it smells like my
family and your family and everything we’ve ever loved about this place.
But when YOU'RE out here taking a big breath, Deb, I can smell the future. That’s
what ties us together - our pasts and our futures - it’s us."
--James Still, Amber Waves
More light!
(last words of Goethe)
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishin in. I drink at
it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its
thin current slides away, but eternity remains."
-- Henry David Thoreau
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious"
becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example,
there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight
lines.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
"Dying is easy ... comedy is hard"
-- last words of Sir Edmund Kean
"By three methods we may learn wisdom (acting): First,
by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and
third by experience, which is the bitterest."
-- Confucius
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed
in imitation."
-- Herman Melville
Our best thoughts come from others.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable
people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends
on unreasonable people.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Loves conquers all things except poverty and a toothache.
-- Mae West
A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in
himself.
-- George Bernard Shaw
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be
well-mannered.
-- Voltaire
Don't force it; get a larger hammer.
-- Anthony's Law of Force
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism
what will be grasped at once.
-- Cyril Connolly
It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation
is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious
than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own
thoughts.
-- Boris Yeltsin
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling
a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
-- Abraham Lincoln
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how
to do it.
-- Pablo Picasso
"Where's my stick? I need to beat an actor!"
-- muttered by student stage manager Charles Gornik when an actor missed an
entrance
"Push something hard enough and it will fall over."
-- Fudd's First Law
Negative expectations yield negative results. Positive expectations yield
negative results.
-- Non-Reciprocal Law of Expectations
I don't think I shall ever get over this.
-- last words of Leigh Hunt
The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder
of civilization.
-- Sigmund Freud
Our best thoughts come from others.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt
to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable
people.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Loves conquers all things except poverty and a toothache.
-- Mae West
A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in
himself.
-- George Bernard Shaw
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be
well-mannered.
-- Voltaire
"Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend
to be."
-Kurt Vonnegut
"Acting is an everlasting search for truth." -- Sir Laurence Olivier
"Theater is more than psychology. It should rise above reality. It
should become poetry. To me, theater is about paradise, perhaps a lost or utopian
paradise, but a paradise anyway. It is about a dream. Theater should show great
black holes, in which diamonds suddenly glitter."
--director Ivo van Hove
"Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern
thought, but Hamlet invented it"
--Oscar Wilde
"As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked
body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish."
- George Bernard Shaw
"I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.
I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're
like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds."
--- Wallace Shawn
"There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the
glare that obscures."
-- James Thurber
"On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that
razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character
of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity
The theater is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.'"
--Thornton Wilder
"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience."
--George Bernard Shaw
"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
- Alfred Hitchcock
Tu quoque Brute, file mi! - You too Bruto, my son!
- Caesar's last words
"Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life while
they live it?—every, every minute?
Stage Manager: No... Saints and Poets maybe they
do some."
-- Our Town --Thornton Wilder
"Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations."
- Orson Welles
"If someone wants a sheep, then that means that he exists."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome
for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
"Only the shallow know themselves."
- Oscar Wilde
"I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only
six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on
this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just
fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also
find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to
find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are
bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people."
--John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation
"The imagination. It's there to sort out your nightmare, to show you
the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to transform the nightmare into dreams,
that become your bedrock. If we do not listen to that voice, it dies, it shrivels,
it vanishes. The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination
is the place we are all trying to get to."
--John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation
"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire.
All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald
"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a
kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere
else."
- Tom Stoppard
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does.
That’s his."
"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom
is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately
in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever"
-- The Importance of Being Earnest --
"You know youve achieved perfection in design, not when
you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"There is no civilization. Half the world turns its back
while the other half bleeds and dies."
~ Lee Blessing
"War isn't a tear in the fabric of things, it is the
fabric. If earth is our mother, our father is war. The chief priority we have
on earth is to vie with each other for a place to stand."
~Lee Blessing Two Rooms
"...if there are self made purgatories, then we all have to live in
them. Mine can be no worse than someone else's."
-D.C. Fontana
"What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time; be but to
sleep and feed? a beast, no more."
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4. Scene IV
"That I essentially am not in madness, But mad in craft."
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3. Scene IV
"A theater is not a building. A theater is a group of people
working together -- actor and audience sharing a sense of our common humanity.
All those who work on a production, whether onstage or off, do so for this common
purpose."
- Joe Dowling, Artistic Director, Guthrie Theater
"It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them
and not to deserve them."
- Mark Twain
"My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income."
- Errol Flynn
Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici ("By the power of truth, I, while living,
have conquered the universe.")
-Christopher Marlowe Doctor Faustus
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend
to be."
- Kurt Vonnegut
"You know, you can't please all the people all the time... and last
night, all those people were at my show."
- Mitch Hedberg
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- Albert Einstein
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
-Oscar Wilde
"Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it
yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them,
you must yourself believe."
—Winston Churchill
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without
it we go nowhere."
~Carl Sagan
"Make no mistake: This is a bad play -- one that ought to be sent
to its room to think about what it has done."
~ Dominic Papatola
"Artists use lies to tell the truth while politicians
use them to cover it up."
-V for Vendetta
"Regardless of what weapons they try to use to effect silence, words will
always retain their power. Words are the means to meaning, and for some, the
annunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong
with this country."
-V
for Vendetta
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is
an idea, and ideas are bulletproof."
-V
for Vendetta
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should
be afraid of their people."
-V
for Vendetta
"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely
insane every night of our lives."
- William Dement
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
--Albert Einstein
"No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness."
--Aristotle
"All tragedies are finished by a death, all comedies by a marriage."
-- Lord Byron
"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."
-- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967)
"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it
would have changed the history of music... and of aviation."
-- Tom Stoppard -- The Real Thing
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an
open sewer and die."
-- Mel Brooks
"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us,
with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke,
and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
- Tom Stoppard
"Humor is just another defense against the universe."
--Mel Brooks
"I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve
that either."
- Jack Benny
"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?'
Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'"
- Charles M. Schulz
"I often quote myself. I find it adds spice to the conversation."
--George Bernard Shaw
"Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him."
- Last words of John Barrymore
"Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four."
- Katharine Hepburn
"Some people at church said, 'How can you do this show, being a Christian?' And I said, 'We don't live in a Pollyanna society. God called upon me to act...I have to present the world as it is.' That pretty much ended their argument there."
-- Nicholas Worth
"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."
--
Peter O'Toole
"We're actors - we're the opposite of people."
-- Tom Stoppard
"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
--Mark Twain
"Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four."
--
Katharine Hepburn
"Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion."
-- Kate Reid
"We're actors - we're the opposite of people."
--Tom Stoppard