Quotes

"All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story"
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "The danger of a single story" TED Talks

"He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."
St Francis of Assisi

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words; discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance"
James Baldwin, Paris Review, Interviews II

"Its hard, actors try to cry. People try not to. Actors try to be angry. People try not to, in general. Whenever you are put in a position where you have to do everything you can not to do something, that’s usually the best thing in the scene" 
George Clooney


"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." 
Viktor Frankl

"We distrust spontaneity, and try to replace it with reason: the Mask was driven out of theatre in the same way that improvisation was driven out of music. Shakers have stopped shaking. Quakers don't quake anymore. Hypnotized people used to stagger about and tremble. Victorian mediums used to rampage about the room. Education itself might be seen as primarily an anti-trance activity." 
From "Impro" by Keith Johnstone. From Masks and Trance, Section 3: Destroying the Mask

"In any process of creation the object made no longer belongs to the creator. The aim of this act of creation is to bear fruit which then separates from the tree." 
Jacques Lecoq, page 17, The Moving Body

"The body knows things about which the mind is ignorant" 
Jacques Lecoq

"The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Any time we feed soul, it guarantees increase." 
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

"It is from the blot that inspiration is born"
Pablo Picasso

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them." 
George Bernard Shaw, "Mrs. Warren's Profession"

"When you're and actor you cease to be male and female, you're a person, and you're a person with all other persons inside you" 
Sybil Thorndike

"Make it as personal as you can. Believe me, you can't imagine a feeling everyone hasn't had. Make it personal, tell the truth, and then write "Burn this" on it"  
Lanford Wilson