The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
— What happens at the finish?
— Then we have ourselves a rowdy dow! Ain't you never been to a theatre before?
We only have so much to give, don’t we? And up there I’m not myself, or perhaps more correctly I’m a succession of selves. We must all be a profound mixture of selves, don’t you think? To me, acting is first and foremost intellect, and only after that, emotion. The one liberates the other, and polishes it. There’s so much more to it than simply crying or screaming or producing a convincing laugh. It’s wonderful, you know. Thinking myself into another self, someone I might have been, had the circumstances been there. That’s the secret. Not becoming someone else, but incorporating the role into me as if she was myself. And so she becomes me.
— Jonson. Come closer. Did you know my family can trace... its peerage back further than any other family in the kingdom? We fought at Crecy,
at Bosworth Field, at Agincourt. When I inherited my earldom... I was one of the richest men ever to breathe English air. And at last breath,
I shall be one of the poorest. Never a voice in government. Never a sword raised in glorious battle. Words. Merely words shall be my sole legacy. You alone watch my plays and know them as mine. When I hear the applause... the cheering of the audience, the hands clapping... I know they are celebrating another man. But in that... cacophony of sounds, I strained to hear two hands only. Yours. But hear them, I never did. You have never told me... Never... told me what you thought of my work.
— I find... your words... the most... wondrous... heard on our stage. On any stage. Ever. You... are the soul of the age.
— Harvey, come on. Opera is so passé.
— You're not understanding the spectacle of it, the bigger than life emotions.
— The bigger than life emotions?
The holidays are an obligatory performance where families buy each other gifts and pretend everything is perfect.
A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.
If two people talk and the third listens to their conversation — it is a theater.