Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed.
I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember.
The script of a play is not a finished product: It's a set of instructions.
Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. You don't see it.
For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate.
All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.
David Cromer, from Chicago, I think is the most gifted young director in America.
There is still a lot to be said for the well-made, witty, clever, three-act comedy.
Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments.
I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto.
Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood.
Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.
I know that luck has a way of happening to people who shoot high, who never sell themselves short.
Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music.
Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written.
A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself.
Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it.
The good news is that 'High School Musical' seems to be getting a lot of youngsters excited about theater.
In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out.
Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.
I can remember - barely - when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs.
Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers.
Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own.
There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri.
If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle.
I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns.
Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement.
What's the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was 'Noises Off,' but now that I've seen 'The Liar,' I'm not so sure.
The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there.
This impeccably researched study of the classic black insult game may be the funniest work of serious scholarship ever published.
A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means - and change it as often as you like.
A critic should always strive to recapture the sense of wonder and surprise with which he first beheld a now-familiar work of art.
For the critic, the word 'best' is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely, and you're likely to get your hand blown off.
The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing.
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.
One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.
Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible.
Needless to say, anybody who can stumble through a C-major scale knows that Art Tatum always gave his audiences 10 times their money's worth.
The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres.
Most 'Monty Python' fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age.
I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.
What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone.
At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction.
EXTREMELY FUNNY! A SUPER-VIRTUOSO! I expected to enjoy 'The Two and Only,' but I didn't expect to be touched, much less to find my eyes growing moist.
I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing 'dumber,' if what you really mean to say is 'less culturally literate.'
Ai Weiwei, who is both a widely admired conceptual artist and a fearless human-rights activist, has been on the bad side of the Chinese government for years.
Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.'
What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.
The first play I ever saw - I was in junior high school - was a high school production of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit,' which seemed to me absolutely magical.
I suspect that most playgoers don't understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.