Brecht Quotes

I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.

I hesitate to say because it sounds silly, but the first play I did was The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Brecht.

I'm Opera Singer. I can sing Brecht, Weil.

[Bertholt] Brecht looked very thin, like a herring with very sensitive hands.

In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.

The dilemma of Brechtian performance is that, for all of Brecht's emphasis on rationality and the undermining of theatrical illusion, the actor must convincingly portray something that she is not.

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.

I was called up in the war and sent to a hospital. I dressed wounds, applied iodine, gave enemas, did blood transfusions. If the doctor ordered: "Brecht, amputate a leg!", I would reply, "Certainly, Your Excellency!", and cut off the leg. If I was told, "Perform a trepanning!" I opened the man's skull and messed about with his brains. I saw how they patched fellows up, so as to cart them back to the Front as quickly as they could.

I'm from East Berlin. I grew up in the Bertold Brecht, Kurt Weil tradition, also in the old hippie tradition.

A lot of people don't know that my background is completely classical. For a while there, I was all about Molière and the Greeks and Brecht and Tennessee Williams.

I have a great interest in Victorian musical & cabaret performances and Weimar artists so the references are there, to Cabaret and also All That Jazz and other films where, where there's a kind of (influential German playwright Bertolt) Brecht-ian approach, almost to the character standing outside of himself or, in this case, he's "self-séance-ing."

Everything Brecht wrote—plays, dialogues, and poetry—was his attempt to clarify the inner contradictions not only of the capitalism and fascism of his times, but also of the communism that was always disappointing his deepest hopes. In a book that makes Brecht’s struggle to reveal these hidden contradictions its central theme, Glahn issues, by implication, a call to arms to today’s artists—who are faced with a world that seems to defy attempts to treat the global crisis with an art that is rarely more than notes on ‘local’ angst.

I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.

What I like about [Berthold] Brecht, it's very interesting. When Helene Weigel came over and somebody talked about Lotte Lenya and said "well, she wasn't alienating." And Weigel said "No, no, no. Why, Lotte Lenya was so true - who cares?" She said: "Berti only developed the theory of alienation in order to stop bad acting." I heard her say that. Now that's brilliant.

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.

I never know who's influencing me at any time. I mean, I can take a play by Brecht and adapt it, I'm consciously adapting that play, or, as I've done with the Greek classics, Euripides and Oedipus, and I'm consciously adapting that play. Whether it influences me or not, I think it's the critics, the analysts who have to decide that. Me, I don't feel that I'm under the influence of any such sources.

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

I've never done a [Berthold] Brecht. In the 1960s when the Berliner Ensemble came over [to England] with Helene Weigel [Brecht's second wife], I saw all the Berlin actors. It was an amazing time, very exciting early 1960s.