The Player quotes

View Quote Audiences know what they expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in.

View Quote For a handful of coin I happen to have a private and uncut performance of "The Rape of the Sabine Women," or rather woman, or rather Alfred, and for eight you can participate.

View Quote We're tragedians, you see? We follow directions – there is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

View Quote We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. Sometimes quoted as: Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.

View Quote Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it.

View Quote There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors – we're the opposite of people!

View Quote We're more of the love, blood and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

View Quote We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

View Quote Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.

View Quote Pirates could happen to anyone.

View Quote I congratulate you on the unambiguity of your situation.

View Quote My talent is more general. I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not, in fact, contain.