Curtain Quotes

I never went to business school. I was just bumbling through a lot of my life. I was like the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

Take it from someone who fled the Iron Curtain: I know what happens when you give the Russians a green light.

Believe me, it jabs you. When you’re on the side of buses and New York loves you, you love to go out there every night. It’s like a race. Curtain opens, out you go, and New York is yours.

Theater is a thankless art. When the curtain goes down, that is all. It doesn’t really mean anything. Memories are very short, and fame is extremely fleeting.

I’ve never walked through the curtain with someone I wasn’t trying to audition as a WrestleMania main-eventer, and I never want to.

Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain.

I was always the first person in the theater all the time. If it was an eight-o’clock curtain, I was here at five-thirty, and it wasn’t that I needed to vocalize, because I was all warmed up. I couldn’t wait for it to begin.

Oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures.

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our ‘colorblind’ society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure – the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

I remember the Soviet Union and when the Iron Curtain fell down in 1991. I was just 20 years old, and everybody had a dream to live in a modern democratic society, in a modern country. More than 15 years passed, and nothing changed. There’s a saying I like very much: if you want a thing done well, do it by yourself.

I was an immigrant. I came here at 12. We were caught behind the Iron Curtain until I was 10.

The NRA isn’t a boogeyman organization behind a curtain. The NRA is made up of millions of people who believe in the Second Amendment and the organization is very closely connected to the country music community.

It’s nowhere near as intense as what I imagine an actor experiences backstage, but I feel a fluttering nervousness before a curtain goes up on a play. I mean, any play, anywhere – on Broadway or the Bowery or in a church basement.

From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.

No books ever go into my laboratory. The thing I am to do and the way are revealed to me the moment I am inspired to create something new. Without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless. Only alone can I draw close enough to God to discover His secrets.

I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.

One blob of red in the wrong place and the audience isn’t looking at the hero, they’re looking at a patch of curtain (or something similar) and your whole effect is lost.

There are simple, small things you can do that really will impact the space. Things like changing out your curtain panels to something that adds a fresh new feel. Or maybe a smart pattern. Also swapping out an area rug, throws and pillows can be done in no time, and really have a dramatic effect.

Ke$ha is her art; there is no curtain you peel back to find the real person. And with Ke$ha, you never know what to expect when you’re in the studio.

When you do a good theatrical production, sometimes you dream about that 8 o’clock curtain call for six months.

I’ve had some of the best craft services on independent movies, actually, because they get more creative, generally, with a smaller budget. The work is still the same. I didn’t really notice the difference other than I was getting dressed behind a curtain, basically.

The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

In these times of the ‘Great Recession’, we shouldn’t be trying to shift the benefits of wealth behind some curtain. We should be celebrating and encouraging people to make as much money as they can. Profits equal tax money. While some people might find it distasteful to pay taxes, I don’t. I find it patriotic.

I am a witness to nations and people deprived of their freedom. I was there. I watched that great Iron Curtain drop around nations which formerly had prized their freedom – good people. I was aghast as these were written off by the stroke of a pen.

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them.

You could get in rehearsals, pre-production, anything that would actually contribute to the understanding of how a film gets made. I actually find those things increase people’s interest in a movie and like that better than worrying about showing the tricks behind the curtain.

To me, when – just like when you watch a movie or you watch a TV show, to me, you know, Nicole Kidman or Leonardo DiCaprio, you know that they are actors, but also, great actors find that extension of themselves. So, when I walk through that curtain, I find the extension of myself of being the Ravishing Russian in there.

You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you’re in another world.

Americans have always risen to the moment, from defeating the scourge of fascism to bringing down the Iron Curtain.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

I was always dragging my poor mother to some school production, and sometimes shed be so embarrassed shed want to slide under the table, because, you know, all the other little girls had on their cute little pink tutus and here I come with a curtain on and a lampshade on top of my head!

Funny is not a color. Being black is only good from the time you get from the curtain to the microphone.

Stampede Wrestling was a promotion started by my grandfather, Stu Hart. When I was competing for them, I would come out ‘through the curtain,’ slapping everyone’s hands to my ring song, Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun.’

In Utah, the American melting pot is unstirred. Three out of four people are Mormons, and they are all here in this bleakly beautiful sanctuary ‘behind the Zion curtain’ because of religious persecution.

I always say I want to die on the eighth curtain call. Eight will mean the show’s been rather a success.

I love telling stories, whether I’m the human instrument that helps tell that story, or I’m the man behind the curtain.

Yes, there is plenty of hard work for them in addition to that which they do when they appear, smiling and happy, when the curtain goes up. Giving a performance is the least of their worries.

‘West Wing’ was huge. Like ‘Hamilton,’ it pulls back the curtain on how decision-making happens at the highest level, or at least how you hope it would be. The amount of information Aaron Sorkin packs into a scene gave me this courage to trust the audience to keep up.

That’s kind of fuse for the show – those first 10-15 seconds you’re onstage. The curtain drops and you see the crowd for the first time and they see you for the first time. The response and the energy that’s going on right there – to me, that sets the tone for the rest of the night.

On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds- a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality!

The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.

But scientists on both sides of the iron curtain played a very significant role in maintaining the momentum of the nuclear arms race throughout the four decades of the Cold War.

When you live in a small town behind the Pine Curtain, you live inside your head a lot.

I remember when I was doing ‘The Crucible’ on Broadway with Laura Linney, and Arthur Miller had been in rehearsal with us and was on stage on opening night. She turned to me during the curtain call and said, ‘Let’s make sure we remember this.’

My private history in terms of people in my life who are dead is very easy to discuss. I don’t feel those people can be threatened or intruded upon now. But I am enormously protective of the people who are currently in my life, my existing friends and family. That is where the curtain is drawn.

When you lose a parent, you realize how vital they are to the foundation of your life. It’s impossible to understand what it means until that curtain is pulled. You’re an orphan. But then I think that life is kind of remarkable, and the thing that causes the biggest pain can also bring amazing energy.

When the curtain falls, the best thing an actor can do is to go away.

Eudora Welty’s ‘A Curtain of Green’ had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.

I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn’t.

I would like to be remembered as the reporter who snuck back stage to all the off-limits shows, be it the Vatican dressing room, the Pentagon war room, or the Celtics locker room. Some curtains ought never to be pulled back; others deserve to be ripped down. When appropriate, I want to be the curtain remover.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

As an actor, you know that every act has a closing curtain.

In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

The revelation is that when you lift the curtain, history is decided by a very small group of people, and their own interests guide their actions, not necessarily the laws or principles we think our country rides on.

You know, entertainment is just a curtain at the end of the day.

When I’m in the ring, I’m doing great. As Razor Ramon or the ‘Bad Guy,’ I don’t have a care in the world. But when I come back through the curtain, reality is there waiting.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain – there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up – and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It’s a complete experience.

The real concern for the Russians is that they’re going to get closed out, that there’s gong to be a new ‘Iron Curtain’… for European expansion and all of its institutional forms.

When I served in the Army, along the Iron Curtain we had a word for a person who absconds with information and provides it to another nation: traitor. We also had a name for a person who chooses to reveal secrets he had personally promised to protect: common criminal.

The first thing I do when I walk into a hotel is find the gym, and if they don’t have a gym, I start looking for a handhold where I can do my pull-ups. Sometimes if a shower curtain rod is sturdy enough, I’ll do them there.

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I’ll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.

My eyes don’t work, at least not fully, because they are blocked by disease. The scene around me appears through a kind of curtain, a haze.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.

Someone asked me who I would be if I were a character in the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ I would be the curtain. I would be the one who saw both sides that nobody noticed, that was pretty and there to be used and discarded when they were done.

Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.

‘Billy Elliot’ prides itself on being a family show, and it made sense to specifically cater to a family audience with an earlier evening curtain time.

We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.

I don’t display my plaques and honors. They are hidden behind a black curtain in my work room at home.

Like with all the Arabs, they use the ‘suspect procedure’ on me. I arrive four hours before the flight. They do a body search in a back room behind the curtain and then escort me onto the plane because they’re afraid that on the way I might pick up a bomb from someone.

Surprisingly, the Eisenhower Memorial design contains almost none of the known Gehry-box of tricks. His giant etched chain-link curtain, first applied in 1979 to hide an ungracious parking garage at Santa Monica Place, is resurrected for Eisenhower to screen the equally graceless facade of the Department of Education.

It’s not scary to make a horror film because you get to pull back the curtain and see that none of it’s real. When you’re watching one, the terror bombards you.

I was shy at school, but not at home. We had a boiler that had tiles around it, so if my sister and I got new shoes we’d do a little tap dance on the tiles. I also wrote poems but would read them from behind a curtain.

Once the curtain is raised, the actor is ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

When we went on the air, I didn’t want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.

The thing about Instagram and fashion is that is has absolutely taken down the sense of the velvet rope and has pulled the curtain aside on the entire experience that used to be for a select 100 people in the world. Now it is there for millions of people to consume.

Talking about theater, actually, I built a little barn in upstate New York, and I call it ‘the smallest theater in the world,’ but it has a mini stage and a red velvet curtain.

For one thing, I would like to see some new faces in all sports associations. Often you have the same people controlling a sport. They may change their designations or they may be controlling affairs from behind the curtain even when they don’t have any role officially.

I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.

Every year in Edinburgh, I end up waiting behind the curtain about to go on stage, and I have a moment of thinking, ‘No one’s told me what to do with this show. I’ve done exactly what I wanted. This is the biggest arts festival in the world, and all these people have shown up. Aren’t I lucky?’ It really is amazing.

The ghastly thing about being a producer is that, once the curtain goes up, there is nothing you can do. At least when you are in it, you have some measure of control. If something goes wrong, you can maybe put it right. When you are in the audience, there is nothing you can do.

The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted.

Mork, played by Robin Williams, was my introduction to improv, and my first real peek behind the curtain of television production; I had seen Williams riffing on ‘The Tonight Show’ and soon put it together that certain scenes with Mork were not scripted.

This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible.

You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it, you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.

It’s bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I’ve ever had in my life.

I would rather the man who presents something for my consideration subject me to a zephyr of truth and a gentle breeze of responsibility rather than blow me down with a curtain of hot wind.

I was in the Rockin’ Vicars, which was the first British band to tour behind the Iron Curtain. A lot of photos were taken of us next to milk churns.

It’s always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I’ve always preferred to go straight through.

My bindis were undoubtedly a fashion craze, but I was zapped to see a woman in Nagpur use a curtain ring to glam up her pallu, as I had done in ‘KKR!’

I have a whole box full of pieces of the Berlin Wall and a heart made from the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain. It’s – they’re cherished treasures to me now, of course.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

We use a curtain, so we don’t use a net, so there’s nothing sea life can get entangled with. And also, the system moves very slowly. It moves around 4 inches per second on average. So really, the chances of sea life being harmed by this are very minimal.

Certainly a curtain has never fallen too soon for me. Every play is too long, even the short ones. Every concert, every film, every television programme the same.

I had a jeep made up for Michael, and he would take it on tour, and he would hide behind it, like a curtain.

When Joan Rivers walked through the curtain on ‘The Tonight Show,’ nobody in my house was allowed to utter a sound. Her gait was full of pep and purpose and her voice unmatched.

I always stayed for the first curtain call and people always said, ‘Who’s that?’ But this got me started in acting.

To peel the curtain back, I don’t know if I could do Curry Man the same way I did it in TNA and not be racially insensitive.

I think the idea of ‘Mary Poppins’ has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.

There tends to be this hierarchy of film and television, and theater is somewhere else in its own milieu. However, as actors, yes, we love to do theater because it’s our story. Nobody can edit it, the curtain goes up, and it’s ours for two hours or three, or whatever. And we tell it.