Play out the play ...

All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players.

Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on; Judge not the play before the play is done: Her plot hath many changes; every day Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.

Coming to New York and not going to the theater is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and not making love.

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

The truth is you don't like the theater except the times when you're in a room by yourself putting the play on paper.

One's roused by this, another finds that fit: Each loves the play for what he brings to it.

Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live.

As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish.

The stage-play is a trial, not a deed of violence. The soul is opened, like the combination of a safe, by means of a word. You don't require an acetylene torch.

In my plays I want to look at life-at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.

Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks: Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks. The founders you: the table is this place: The carvers we: the prologue is the grace. Each act a course, each scene, a different dish.

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.

In London, theatregoers expect to laugh; in Paris, they wait grimly for proof that they should.

Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington, Don't put your daughter on the stage, The profession is overcrowdedAnd the struggle's pretty toughAnd admitting the fact She's burning to act, That isn't quite enough.

Throughout the play everything possible was done to show the virtue, innocence and helplessness of the poor, and the abandoned cruelty, the heartless self-indulgence of the rich.

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.

There is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.

All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.