Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Theatre Directors - Page 2

Any play I do, anything I do in the theatre, it's absolutely essential for me in a sense, to create a family in order to. To create, in other words, to put a group of people together who love to share together what they're doing, rather than be individuals as such.

I love working with people I've worked with before and that can be true of when people have worked together. But if two people have a natural chemistry and it just works, to be there for the first time, particularly on a story where it's about these two people meeting for the first time, that goes a long way.

Identity is a very difficult thing in the theatre. As an actor said to me one day, 'What are we doing today?' when we were doing a workshop. And I said, 'Oh, just be yourself'. And he said to me, 'I don't know who that is, I'm an actor'. And I begin to realise in fact that we seek identity because we're told we should have one, but I wonder whether it's necessary.

You're the answer to are we alone in the universe?

I loved doing school musicals [as a kid], I even started at an early age to write little plays for the school to perform. I was not just keen on that, it was during that time, during the school period then from an early age, that I began to dream about acting.

Just as Americans have discovered the hidden energy costs in a multitude of products-in refrigerating a steak, for example, on its way to the butcher-they are about to discover the hidden water costs. Beginning with the water that irrigated the corn that was fed to the steer, the steak may have accounted for 3,500 gallons. The water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer. It takes 14,935 gallons of water to grow a bushel of wheat, 60,000 gallons to produce a ton of steel, 120 gallons to put a single egg on the breakfast table.

I much prefer to work with dead writers, and ones who were writing four hundred years ago.

I would love to direct a play. But I think when people look at me they see music and dancing and singing.

I think a woman who is successful is critiqued more harshly than a man is critiqued.

The song becomes the meaning itself through the vibratory qualities. When we begin to catch the vibratory qualities...the song begins to sing us...I don't know anymore if I am finding that song or if I am that song.

If you cast your supporting cast well, it should be seamless. You shouldn't even notice who's a big part and who's a small part. A good cast enriches everything.

I don't want to work with someone who's nervous, I want to work with someone who is fearless

I ran the Gate in Notting Hill for a while, which is where Stephen Daldry started out. Those theaters are magical, because there's no money, so in a way there're no boundaries and it allows you to be inventive and brave and take risks and all those important things while you're starting out.

I don't have a particular genre that I want to stick to; if you work on a small piece, you take that experience with you when you work on a big piece and vice versa. You will take those experiences with you and they will make the next one richer.

The actor's physical type is the main consideration. It isn't and shouldn't be. Does the actor "look the part"? It is the simplest question to deal with. The director deludes himself who yields to the temptation to believe that an affirmative answer settles the matter. An actor's looks will impress an audience initially but after his first five minutes on stage it becomes aware of what he or she communicates (or fails to communicate) through acting!

Actors should arouse a sense of wonder because of their ability to exceed what the spectators can envision ever being able to do.

Music has always been a part of my spiritual seeking, from the moment that Handel's 'Messiah' gave me the experience when I was so young, and music has meant so much to me since then.

Art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.

I know a lot of choreographers prefer to do abstract dance and not be bothered with a story, but even when I'm asked to do classical ballet or a modern piece, I still want to tell a story.

There's a transparency revolution sweeping the world. The more you can have transparency of payments, the more you'll be able to follow the money and the more you'll be able to see that payments for mineral rights in poor countries actually go to the people who need it, and don't get put into a kleptocrat's pocket. Transparency is terribly important for us.

His art is the health of the artist.

I imagine that all Americans have a unique relationship in their individual present to their collective past and how that relationship might shape their identities and experiences.

My wish and hope, every year, is that people's life chances - their chances of having a happy, prosperous, healthy life for themselves and their family and friends - should not depend on accident of birth. It shouldn't depend on where you're born. It should depend on who you are and what you do. But it shouldn't depend on the chance and the luck of being born in the U.S. or in a poor village in Sub-Saharan Africa or India or wherever it may be.

I love art and I find myself at the MoMA all the time. Museums are a real refuge for me. I go to a museum for any break that I have, and I'm very inspired by art.

Let me die the moment my love dies. Let me not outlive my own capacity to love. Let me die still loving, and so, never die.

The camera kind of finds things that the naked eye can't even see. By moving in a certain way, you're already telling part of the story.

When I began to direct, I began to understand and realise that everything that I'd learnt, both in music and dance and in the theatre, seemed to come together as a director, and I began to enjoy it. And slowly I let the acting go.

Change the molecules, juices in the blood, so they do things differently.

The Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki once stated, 'International cultural exchange is impossible - therefore we must try.' I agree with all my heart. The impossibility of seeing beyond one's own cultural context is a political act in the world and has the potential to break down the rigid assumptions surrounding us.

It is a miracle a musical gets up because of all the different departments and how much it costs. It is a miracle.

The men who go out the scientists who go out, they have so much fun on the way that when they get there well it's done. So they're looking for another thing. You see the objective may remain the same - the search - but you must get lost on the way, get stupid to my mind, this is what you do in theatre; a team of people go out to look for something, they find, maybe, something else.

I've always loved fairy tales. I think they perhaps led me to theater rather than the other way around. As a child I wanted to invent a machine that could record my dreams, so I could watch them in the morning; or hire someone to draw the things I had in my head, because I knew I didn't have the skill to do it myself. Theater is that machine. I can make these images come to life and actually walk around inside them for a while.

Pleasure was the color of the time.

We create truths by describing, or by re-describing , our beliefs and observations. Our task, and the task of every artist and scientist, is to re-describe our inherited assumptions and invented fictions in order to create new paradigms for the future.

There are so many forms, I believe people are bright enough to make their own laws, more subtle ones than we've had before.

In conducting interviews, my fascination is not only with the content of the conversation, but also the overall delivery of spoken language - so much of one's personality and story is embedded within their speech, their rhythms, the structure of their thoughts, their use of particular diction or dialect.

When you're casting, you have to do quite a bit of research. But I always think you have to do it with a pinch of salt with actors, because it's so unfair to pigeonhole them and so often they are. I try to be as open as possible and if people are really interested and really want to have a go, then let's get them in and see them.

The object is freedom.

There is more at stake here than just our lives. It is the lives around us.

When you go to Africa and you see people who are just like you and me - this is always my starting point. These are people who are just like you and me. The same synapses, same things are firing off in their heads, same dreams for their children, same hopes and aspirations that we all have. What can one do to reduce the possibility that their chances of a happy and healthy and prosperous life are not solely determined by the accident of where they were born?

I'm really happy when I'm immersed in the art of it all - immersed in the music, the dance, the visual. Tapping into joy - it saves you.

You can be the world's greatest hero or its most mild-mannered citizen, but the only person who can write your story...is you.

If you want to create a masterpiece, you must always avoid beautiful lies.

It takes such a particular amazing and extraordinary type of personality to become an actor. I love them. You can't do my job without them. I've worked with a lot of film actors and most of them are so, so prepared in their approach because they are used to turning up ready to shoot: you have to have your performance, you have to have your lines, you have to have everything pretty much decided and ready to go whenever everyone else is ready.

Joan of Arc should be played as a "pain in the ass" and how do I know she was a "pain in the ass"? ... because they burn her at the end.

I wasnt political in order to be political

You cannot create results. You can only create conditions in which something might happen.

I don't believe you should interfere with any classic for reasons of religious or political correctness.

You can't remember what movie you saw two weeks ago, but you can remember what Broadway show you saw two weeks ago and where you ate dinner - everything about it. There's something about live theatre that hits you in the heart.

Young artists wish for inspired moments. And you find them; you take them; eager artists are bandits. Theatrical moments arrive, and...you grab. Good! You know it will draw attention to you. But you aim to be more than bandits, no? So, okay...now be Samurai.

In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.

I believe in serendipity, but I also believe there are times when you have to be the one who lines up everything so it can fall into place.

The first move toward the determination of the direction of my art was the fortunate invention of plans for Blok’s wonder The Puppet Show.