The Return of Friday Arts Quotes!

After a hiatus, Friday Arts Quotes are back!

"Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process." - Peter Shaffer

"I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence." - Tom Stoppard

"If you want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, be an audience. " - Tallulah Bankhead

Friday Arts Quotes

"A play's got to be a dramatic event, not a lyrical event. It's not music, it's not poetry, it's not dance, it's not narrative - it's dramatic...it's about conflict. It's about forces coming together."
- Romulus Linney

"When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens."
- Madeleine L'Engle

"Learning to write for the theatre is learning to be a human being, because the theatre by its very nature makes you deal with other human beings."
- David Ives

Friday Arts Quotes

"A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great." - Arthur Miller

"The primary function of a theatre is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent." - Robert Brustein

"I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act." - Orson Welles

Friday Arts Quotes

"I regard 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" - Thorton Wilder or Oscar Wilde (attribution debated)

"Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.” - Henry Miller

“You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film -- you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.” - Daniel Day-Lewis

Friday Arts Quotes

"Fringe theatre, playing in small and unlikely places, happens all over the country. It is fitful, but then it should be. Wonderful things occur alongside terrible things. But the vitality exists because of the support of the actors. They are the subsidy. They often put up with the humiliation of working for no money - or just for bus fares, becuase they believe." - Peter Hall, The Necessary Theatre

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. - Pablo Picasso

Friday Arts Quotes

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people - Alice Neel

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it. - Henry Moore

What works for acting works for life. To act brilliantly, to live fully, requires nothing less than the complete investment of your entire soul! What we do is holy! - Alice Saltzman

Friday Arts Quotes: Theatre Textbook Edition

If you went through any sort of post secondary theatre training as I did, you probably have a pile of text books kicking around. Of various sizes, shapes, & colors they sit on shelves waiting for their turns to be taken off & consulted as I run into various problems.

For today's edition of Arts Quotes I have turned to that pile & have picked out a few quotes that spoke to me as a student. Some of them I don't find particularly enlightinging today, but when I took the class 5 or so years ago, I seemed to think it was pretty worthwhile.

"We are makers of belief. The director is the one who believes first....He has to believe that he could stand on the corner and sell it, that he could market it, that he could convince people of the beauty, that he could stop passersby and say, "Did you ever wonder about the possibility of this? Isn't this beautiful? Doesn't this strike you as peculiar and wonderful?"
- William Ball, A Sense of Direction

"Playwrights, like all artists, create their works becuase they have something they feel compelled to communicate. Remember that what you come up with should be something you feel passionately about, something you believe in and can get emotional over."
- Buzz McLaughlin, The Playwright's Process

"People tend to dance around the most potent possibilities becuase they fear the monsters that might be lurking there."
- Buzz McLaughlin, The Playwright's Process

"If a performance is truly a collaborative effort, then all the artists and workers in the theatre can be considered performers."
- Oren Parker, Craig Wolf & Dick Block in Scene Design & Stage Lighting

Friday Arts Quotes: The Scripted Edition

This week's edition of Friday Arts Quotes features quotes from the stage, films & TV.

"You write your first draft with your heart but you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think" -William Forrester in Finding Forester

"Observation is a more powerful force than you could possibly reckon. The invisible, the overlooked, the unobserved are the most in danger of reaching the end of the spectrum. They lose the last of their light. From there anything can happen...lives altered forever by you. By the simple effect of being present, by entering the light, by joining the dance." - Old Lady God on Joan of Arcadia

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My arts quotes book is beginning to run out of fresh quotes. If you have any favourite arts quotes that you would like to see featured here, please send them to lois.dawson@mytwu.ca.

Friday Arts Quotes

"The poor need beauty as much as bread becuase they live in ugliness all the time." - Martin Luther

God comes to us in theatre in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity. - Julie Harris

Friday Arts Quotes: Opening Night Edition

It's opening night for Holy Mo at Pacific Theatre, so in honor of that, this week's arts quotes are all about audience - the theatrical ingredient that gets added on opening.

"The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his life time; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been still-born. The reader, viewer, listener, usually grossly underestimates his importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life....The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words. So there is no evading the fact that the artist yearns for "success," becuase that means that there has been a communication of the vision: that all the struggle has not been invalid." - Madeline L'Engle

"When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, "We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world." If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that." -David Mamet

"You need three things in the theatre - the play, the actors & the audience - and each must give something." - Kenneth Haigh

Friday Arts Quotes: Critics Edition

In theatre we seem to have this love/hate relationship with the critics and there is a moment in the show I'm working on that pokes a bit of fun at that. But I'm not going to go into that here. I don't need to. Simon already wrote a great post about it back in spring over at The Next Stage" entitled Critics are your friends. Meet your new friends."

This week's quotes are about critics as they apply to all forms of art: writing, fine arts, music, theatre, opera, dance, and every melding of the above.

"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”—John Steinbeck

"Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works."—John Keats

"The history of criticism begins with the history of art. When the first artist drew his first horse in red chalk on the walls of his cave, the first critic was at his elbow.”—Robert Morss Lovett

"A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded."—Murray Kempton

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.” - Carl Jung

Friday Arts Quotes:

In this week's edition of Friday Arts Quotes: An old favorite & a new find.

I keep a leather bound book on my night table with the word "meditations" on the front of it. Into it I copy any quote that I find particularly inspiring that I will want to look back on and meditate on when I am down. The first quote this week has been in that book since the beginning, and the second just was added this week as I was watching TV.

"What do[es it mean to be] creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career....Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think." - Madeline L'Engle

"But our job as artists is to press on: continue creating, because that's who we are. Even if some critic does squash you like a bug. That's who we are." - Joan of Arcadia, "No Bad Guy"

Two ArtsQuotes to Start my Day

"If the work comes to the artist and says 'Here I am, serve me." then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve."
-Madeline L'Engle Walking on Water

"The few seconds before the curtain went up: she called it the Holy Time. But you don't have to be an actor to know what the Holy Time feels like. It's that breath you take just seconds before you become the person you are meant to become. For some people it feels like forever, and for some it's a moment over far too fast."

- Everwood, Season 1, Episode 13 (The Price of Fame)