"Actors are the opposite of people."
- Tom Stoppard, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

"It's surprising how imaginative you can be with five people and 10 chairs."
- British stage actor David Howey

"What revels are in hand? Is there no play to ease the anguish of a torturing hour?"
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"This is magnificent -- and it is TRUE! It never happened, yet it is still true. What magic art is this?"
- Neil Gaiman, Dream Country
(spoken by Puck when first seeing A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"You played me well, mortal, but I have played me for time out of mind.
And I do Robin Goodfellow better than anyone."
- Neil Gaiman, Dream Country (still Puck, that rascal!)

"Theater is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture."
- Patty Wentz-Daly

"Television is democracy at its ugliest."
- Paddy Chayevsky

"I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth."
- Charlie Chaplin

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It

"I don't know what you can do to let people coming into this profession have some sense of how to maintain a clear vision. Given it's a profession of beggars, we're not really in a position of control."
- Kenneth Branagh

Art & Artists

"The purpose of art is not a rarified, intellectual distillate -- it is life, intensified, brilliant life."
- Alain Arais-Misson

"Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job."
- Andy Warhol

"Art is not a thing; it is a way."
- Elbert Hubbard

"Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at pretty girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea."
- John Ciardi

"I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?"
- Charles de Lint, Memory & Dream

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
- Pablo Picasso

"As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don't. Most children are given far too much praise for their early drawings, so much so that they rarely learn the ability to refine their first crude efforts the way their early attempts at language are corrected.
How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn't look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions. You don't have to be Michelangelo to teach basic art, just as you don't have to be Shakespeare to be able to teach the correct use of language.
Not to be dogmatic about it, because you wouldn't want any creative process to lose its sense of fun and adventure. But that doesn't mean you can't take it seriously as well."
- Charles de Lint, "The Fields Beyond the Fields," Moonlight & Vines

"It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people."
- George Moore

"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
- Oscar Wilde

"Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter."
- Ansel Adams

"The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."
- Agnes de Mille

"Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness."
- George Jean Nathan

"I hate flowers -- I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."
- Georgia O'Keeffe

"Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees."
- Marcel Proust, "Maxims"

"An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it."
- Paul Valery

"The best artists know what to leave out."
- Charles de Lint, The Ivory & the Horn

"There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept."
- Ansel Adams

"The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable."
- H. L. Mencken, "Prejudices, First Series"

"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."
- Robert Motherwell

"As an artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child."
- Charles Burchfield

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist."
- Oscar Wilde

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way -- things I had no words for."
- Georgia O'Keeffe