Here are some quotes that have inspired and influenced us over the years...

 

'All old stories will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale.'
A.S. Byatt | Possession A Romance

 

'Both in art and in literature the function of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time it recalls - and somehow stands for - everything that remains out of the picture.'

Italo Calvino | Under the Jaguar Sun

 

'Do not be an embodiment of fame; do not be a storehouse of schemes; do not be an undertaker of projects; do not be a proprietor of wisdom. Wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all you have received from Heaven but do not think you have gotten anything. Be empty that is all. The perfect man uses his mind like a mirror - going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.'
Chaung-Tzu

 

'Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.'
Einstein

 

'Words strain, crack
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.'
T.S Eliot | Burnt Norton - Four Quartets

 

'I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.'
T.S Eliot | East Coker - Four Quartets

 

'That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.'
T.S Eliot | Dry Salvages - Four Quartets

 

'All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.'
T.S Eliot | Little Gidding - Four Quartets

 

'One `fictions' history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one `fictions' a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.'
Foucault | Knowledge & Power

 

'The theatre is a game of make-believe, and the rules of any game may be varied by use and acceptance.'
Granville Barker | Prefaces to Shakespeare

 

'The fresh matter of a play will provoke a fresh manner, and its interpretation must be as freshly approached.'
Granville Barker | Prefaces to Shakespeare

 

'Singing and dancing are the voice of the Dharma.'
Hakuin

 

'Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.'

Keith Johnstone | Impro

 

'When you speak or act spontaneously you reveal your real self, as opposed to the self you've been trained to present.'

Keith Johnstone | Impro

 

'There is nothing to fear. Just deepen and deepen the questioning until all your preconceived notions of who and what you are vanish, and all at once you will realise that the entire universe is no different from yourself. You are at a crucial stage. Don't retreat - march on!'
Kapleau | The Three Pillars of Zen

 

'Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.'
Karl Marx | Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

 

'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.'
Karl Marx | Theses on Feuerbach

 

'All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.'
J.S. Mill | On Liberty

 

'I would only believe in a god who could dance.'
Nietzsche

 

'The telling and re-telling of stories is our main means for getting insight into and control over our circumstances.'
Alan Sinfield | Introduction to Hamlet

 

'The first and primary audience for good stories, well told, is children...their imaginations can feed the process of theatrical invention.'
Tim Supple | The Young Vic Book

 

'What happens on the stage is a starting point for you to complete in your head.'
Tim Supple | The Young Vic Book

 

'When you're an actor you cease to be male and female, you're a person, and you're a person with all the other persons inside you.'
Sybil Thorndike | Great Acting

 

'People like to separate story-telling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.'
Jeanette Winterson | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

 

'Some people say the best stories have no words...It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language.'
Jeanette Winterson | Lighthouse Keeping

 

'Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.'
Jeanette Winterson | Lighthouse Keeping

'Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.'
Jeanette Winterson | The Stone Gods