"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."
— Sean O'Casey

"[Waiting for Godot] has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice."
— Vivian Mercier

"I am not interested in living in a city
where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running."
— Edward Albee

"I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience."
— Shelley Winters

"How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward."
— Antonin Artaud (The Theater and Its Double)

"I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself"
— Antonin Artaud (The Theater and Its Double)

"...The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.""
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Sin in the theater, I can observe now, is comparable to education in a university: it is there for those who wish to take advantage of it, but fewer do than you might suspect."
— Billie Burke

"...something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there."
— Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire)

"We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead."
— Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)

""A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn""
— Friedrich Dürrenmatt (The Physicists)

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

"MIKADO:
I’m really very sorry for you all, but it’s an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.
The Mikado, Act II"
— W.S. Gilbert

"The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart."
— Marsha Norman