Quotes

This blog sort of links into one a posted a while back called "Stuff Ups, Ad Libs and Saying goodbye" (http://www.theatre.asn.au/blog/tari_xalyr/stuff_ups_ad_libs_and_saying_goodbye) I was flicking through a dictionary of quotes the other day, at work and came across some funny, some debatable and some things worth considering said about the theatre industry, acting and things like that. ACTING "To grasp the full significance of life isthe actors duty, to interpret it is his problem and to express it his dedication." - Marlon Brando "Just say the lines and don't trip over the furniture" - Noel Coward (Wish I'd taken his advice at some points, lol.) "Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult." - Laurence Oliver "Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing." - Ralph Richardson. (I like that one.) "Suit the action to the word and the word to the action" - William Shakespeare CREATIVITY "Why does the muse only speak when she is unhappy? She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy, When I am happy I live and despise writing, For my muse this cannot but be dispiriting." - Stevie Smith DANCE "The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie." - Agnes de Mille WRITING "Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness." - George Simenon "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock proof shit detectore." - Ernest Hemmingway "If you try to nail anything down in the novel, either it kills teh novel or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail." - D.H. Lawrence "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. If it does not convince it is flat pretending to be round." - EM Forster "If you steal from one author it's plagerism, if you steal from many it's research." - Wilson Mizner THEATRE "We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself." - Bertold Brecht "The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre." - Antonin Artaud "The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts." - David Hare Just thought I'd share. Feel free to comment and add to the collection. ~ Tari