Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" The script of a play is not a finished product: It's a set of instructions. "

" Nowadays, most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch 'Breaking Bad' as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play - assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet. "

" 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. "

" As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it. "

" I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock. "

" Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there. "

" The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing. "

" If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America. "

" Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original. "

" The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood. "

" I can remember - barely - when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs. "

" David Cromer, from Chicago, I think is the most gifted young director in America. "

" Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. "

" Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers. "

" Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists. "

" Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. "

" The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall. "

" 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 learned more in the rehearsals for 'The Letter' than I have ever dreamed of know in the theater as a critic. If it doesn't make me a better critic, I'm an idiot. "

" I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so. "

" To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art. "

" In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are. "

" 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. "

" Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets. "