acting

I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.

By increasing the size of the keyhole today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

Actor-manager - one to whom the part is greater than the whole.

We do not go (to the theatre) like our ancestors to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it.

If you give audiences a chance they'll do half your acting for you.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does straight to our emotions deep into the twilight room of the soul.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.

Acting is not being emotional but being able to express emotion.

In music the punctuation is absolutely strict the bars and the rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.

You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.

The whole motivation for any performer is 'Look at me Ma.'

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

Many plays certainly mine are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

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.

The live entertainment Canadians like most is the intimate review a collection of songs and sketches preferably with a satirical bias.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.