Minnie Maddern Fiske Quotes

Idealistic producing is safe. Sensibly projected in the theater, the fine thing always does pay and always will.

…I have never known a movement in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various uplifting activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.

The actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakspere [sic], and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul.

…an actor is exactly as big as his imagination.

You must make your own blunders, must cheerfully accept your own mistakes as part of the scheme of things.

This…is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

Go into the streets, into the slums, into the fashionable quarters. Go into the day courts and the night courts. Become acquainted with sorrow, with many kinds of sorrow. Learn of the wonderful heroism of the poor, of the incredible generosity of the very poor

You must not allow yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded

Many a play is like a painted backdrop, something to be looked at from the front. An Ibsen play is like a black forest, somethingyou can enter, something you can walk about in. There you can lose yourself: you can lose yourself. And once inside, you find such wonderful glades, such beautiful, sunlit places.

The essence of acting is the conveyance of truth through the medium of the actor’s mind and person. The science of acting deals with the perfecting of that medium.