Top 39 Ibsen Quotes & Sayings

I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.

Ibsen is at heart an optimist. He could not close his life's work with a note of negation. When We Dead Awaken is a clear, ringing call to the future.

Acting is rare. You can be rehearsing Ibsen with Sir Richard Eyre and suddenly he has to take a call on his mobile telling him his friend Arthur Miller has died. Or you can come back from a job on the Isle of Man to be told by your agent you're going straight out to South Africa on another shoot. There's not even any time to wash your pants.

Gemma Arterton in 'The Master Builder' at the Almeida - she was absolutely brilliant. Ibsen is difficult and quite hard to follow, but she just brings the stage to life.

I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.

I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

When I went to Yale, I thought it would be like in Stenford 24 hours a day. Robert Brustein, former dean of the Yale School of Drama and founder of the Yale Repertory Theater was there, and we did all this very serious - I would go so far as to say completely humorless - Eastern European drama, as well as August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen, we weren't allowed to do William Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. I was not in the right place.

She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.

If Ibsen's 'Enemy of the People' were alive today, he would recognize the ethic that has informed capitalist and communist countries alike - economic growth before public health and well-being. The true enemies of the people ar those who continue to sacrifice our long-term interests for short-term gains. But perhaps we should all look in the mirror.

Many a play is like a painted backdrop, something to be looked at from the front. An Ibsen play is like a black forest, somethingyou can enter, something you can walk about in. There you can lose yourself: you can lose yourself. And once inside, you find such wonderful glades, such beautiful, sunlit places.

Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

I studied acting in NYU's graduate program, in which we covered everything from Ibsen and Chekov to August Wilson and David Mamet.

Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary.

I haven't read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare - except 'The Merchant of Venice' in ninth grade. I'm not familiar with 'Death of a Salesman.' I haven't read Tennessee Williams.

I relate to Nora's transformation in Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House,' and I also relate to both sisters' journeys in John Madden's film 'Proof.'

Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor in classics like Shaw and Shakespeare and Chekov and Ibsen.

Ibsen is like this room where we are sitting, with all the tables and chairs. Do I care whether you have twenty or twenty-five links on your chain? Hedda Gabler, Nora and the rest: it is not that I want! I want Rome and the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Athens; I want beauty, and the flame of life.

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

I thought I would spent my career doing Chekhov and Ibsen in regional theaters, so the fact that I started doing new plays was a whole new world I didn't expect, and that I would like to keep doing.

I did [Henrik] Ibsen and [Anton] Chekhov for years. Obviously I didn't get the kind of recognition I have now. Somebody once told me, "You ride the horse the direction it's going."

I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.

I can always do theater; I can do Ibsen, I can do Macbeth, I can do Chekhov, I can do Moliere, Othello, I can do Richard III.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door." The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?" Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?

When I saw 'Legally Blonde' on Broadway, I rang my agent and said 'I want to be seen for this,' but the rest weren't big choices, really. 'Hedda Gabler' was a phone call offering it to me, and as I've said before quite embarrassingly, I didn't know the play, so I didn't sit there thinking 'I would now like to tackle Ibsen.'

We depend on the critics to give us a glimpse of what happened. Bernard Shaw championed Ibsen, who got the most terrible notices for his plays. Kenneth Tynan championed young writers, and as a result, the theatre has changed radically.

The actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakspere [sic], and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul.

I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

I'm a big guy: I look like a linebacker, you know? But no one cares, really, that I'm educated. I have a copy of 'Fire Next Time' by James Baldwin in my bag. I have an Ibsen play in there, too. I have to walk through this world with that duality all the time, that I live in two different worlds.

Ibsen was Norwegian by birth, but universal in spirit.

I'm not a big, three-hour-play, Ibsen-revival kind of man.

Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits.

I grew up in the theater, and you can't improvise Shakespeare and Ibsen. You have to speak the language. But obviously, in a contemporary film, there's often room for improvisation and spontaneous things that happen. As long as I know what I'm trying to achieve in the scene, and when something comes up, I know that the response is genuine, I'm comfortable. That's really how I build everything.

A lot of young girls who came to see me in 'Legally Blonde' have come to see 'Hedda,' and they hadn't heard of the play either, just like I was before I did it! If I can bring a younger generation to see an Ibsen play; that's just brilliant.