Minnie Maddern Fiske Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Among the most disheartening and dangerous of... advisors, you will often find those closest to you, your dearest friends, members of your own family, perhaps, loving, anxious, and knowing nothing whatever...

Minnie Maddern Fiske
An actor is exactly as big as his imagination.

Minnie Maddern Fiske
As soon as I suspect a fine effect is being achieved by accident I lose interest. I am not interested...in unskilled labor....The scientific actor is an even worker. Any one may achieve on some rare occasion an outburst of genuine feeling, a gesture of imperishable beauty, a ringing accent of truth; but your scientific actor knows how he did it. He can repeat it again and again and again. He can be depended on.

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

Minnie Maddern Fiske
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.

Minnie Maddern Fiske
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.

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

Minnie Maddern Fiske
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.

Minnie Maddern Fiske
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.

Minnie Maddern Fiske
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.

Minnie Maddern Fiske
I suppose that Paderewski can play superbly, if not quite at his best, while his thoughts wander to the other end of the world, orpossibly busy themselves with a computation of the receipts as he gazes out across the auditorium. I know a great actor, a master technician, can let his thoughts play truant from the scene...

Minnie Maddern Fiske
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

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

Minnie Maddern Fiske