Theater Quotes

The Nastiest, Rudest, & Crudest
Stuff Ever Said About the Theater

Despite the obvious glitz and glamour, working in the theater is a job like any other - with backbiting gossip you'd find around any corporate water cooler. Take a trip backstage, below, and check out the worst comments, nasty asides and other really juicy offstage tidbits ever said by famous actors, playwrights, directors and other showfolk in the know...

The only reason anyone goes to Broadway is because they can't get work in the movies.
-- Bette Davis

It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman.
-- Tallulah Bankhead

Next to a tenor, a wardrobe woman is the touchiest thing in show business. [Birdie, in All About Eve]
-- Joseph Mankiewicz

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
--Oscar Wilde

Shakespeare's plays are bad enough, but yours are even worse.
--Leo Tolstoy, to Anton Chekov

I have no intention of uttering my last words on the stage. Room service and a couple of depraved young women will do me quite nicely for an exit.
-- Peter O'Toole

If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
-- James Thurber

Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite right. They will be.
-- Agnes De Mille

I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.
-- Isadora Duncan

Acting is the art of speaking in a loud clear voice and the avoidance of bumping into the furniture.
-- Alfred Lunt

To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.
-- Eleanor Duse

The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.
-- Alfred Jarry

Related Web Sites:

Theatrical Quotes

World of Quotes - Theater Quotes

Broadway's Lesser Known Awards