Eleanora Duse Art Quotations

To save the Theatre, the Theatre must be destroyed, and actors and actresses all die of the Plague ... they make art impossible.

If I were twenty or thirty years younger, I would start afresh in this field with the certainty of accomplishing much. But I should have to learn from the bottom up, forgetting the theatre entirely and concentrating on the special medium of this new art. My mistake, and that of many others, lay in employing "theatrical" techniques despite every effort to avoid them. Here is something quite, quite fresh, a penetrating form of visual poetry, an untried exponent of the human soul. Alas, I am too old for it!

... does it seem to you that it is possible to speak of Art? It would be the same as explaining love!

Precepts, conventions - above all traditions - have no value in art.

Anyone who presumes to teach art has no understanding of it.

To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.

To help, to continually help and share, that is the sum of all knowledge; that is the meaning of art.