Top 115 Curtain Quotes

Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star.

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 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.

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.

God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.

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

The biggest moment in our business is when you walk through that curtain, and if you don’t believe in yourself, the fans won’t believe in you or invest in you, and they see that.

I don’t like when actors go around and talk a ton about how they approach their roles, because it’s a little like pulling the curtain back on Oz, for me.

It’s strange because even in the vaudeville days, ventriloquists were never the main attraction. They were the guys brought out to stand in front of the curtain while sets were being changed. Ventriloquism wasn’t even celebrated as an art until Edgar Bergen came along in the 1930s.

I was obsessed with ‘The Swish of the Curtain’ by Pamela Brown when I was a child. It’s about a group of kids who create their own Amateur Theatre company. I was already absolute in my decision to be an actor by this point, but if anything, it confirmed to me that I was on the right path.

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.

It’s nice to be able to show how we are like in person and give a peek behind the curtain with ‘Total Divas.’ That’s been my biggest feedback is how different than I am behind the scenes than I am onstage.

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.

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

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.

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.

My father built me a theatre behind the house where I could put on plays. Dear me, I’m making it sound a bit grand, and it wasn’t an amphitheatre or anything like that, just a little place with a roll-up curtain box and I’m sure the plays were childish lopsided things.

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.

Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain.

Anytime a curtain closes forever, that’s always sad news.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

As African-Americans, we don’t start with a blank slate, while other people may. In our position, there’s always some sort of stereotype that is being scrutinized or that is being assumed when we come through the curtain.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The general belief is that communists in the United Nations come only from the Iron Curtain countries, but this isn’t so. We must remember that many of the representatives of free countries are members of the local Communist parties. If you add them all up, you will see they have an amazing degree of control.

Before 1994, many South Africans used theater as a voice of protest against the government. But with the end of apartheid, like the artists who watched the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe, theater had to find new voices and search for new issues.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain – no matter what – after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.

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.

My decorating and renovation skills are nil – indeed, I once used a shower curtain from Pottery Barn as ‘window dressing.’

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.

Whether you win or not, the night the Oscars are over, the curtain goes down and you go back to the grind. Period.

Countries like Iran and China support an Internet Iron Curtain that would censor political dissidents and deny anonymous activity online through mandatory registrations of IP addresses.

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.

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

I feel very privileged to have played China, and the pyramids, all these fantastic places, but it created a kind of smoke curtain between the audience and me as a musician.

I love that moment just before the curtain goes up, whether I’m sitting in the audience or standing backstage. It’s full of expectation. It’s a thrill that’s unequaled anywhere.

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.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain – that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.

One of the few things in dance to match the Royal Ballet’s curtain calls is the Royal Ballet’s dancing.

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.

I mean you pull the curtain away, and you see I’m just as insecure and neurotic and scared and vulnerable as anybody, you know.

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.

‘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.

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 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.

That’s the place we’re in right now: we think we have the capability to get every piece of information, and we don’t. We don’t know what’s going on behind the closed curtain. If we want to say we live in a free democratic society, we should be able to find out whatever we want to.

I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.

How much cooler was Oz than seeing the little dude behind the curtain?

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

The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15.

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.

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

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.

My parents had a six floor warehouse on Curtain Road called Cordy House between 2004 and 2007 where we had some of the most banging and memorable London parties.

The crowd reaction is something that I definitely love. When I first started if I walked out from behind that curtain and heard a pin drop or deafening silence, then you have to look at switching something up.

I used to get notes from directors, ‘Please, Nigel, smile at the curtain calls.’ I hate them so much.

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.’

It was the Victorians who covered the piano legs and drew a heavy curtain over what a lady got up to in her boudoir.

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.

Walking out of that curtain and watching the reaction of the crowd, who may cheer for or boo you, is a kick. It’s addictive and helps us put smiles on children’s faces by being huge role models for young girls and boys.

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.

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’ve done three Broadway shows; once the curtain goes up, that’s it. I mean, you prepare and you rehearse like crazy, but after opening night, the director‘s not there anymore, you know. He gives you notes during previews after each performance, but opening night, you’re on your own.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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 love good balance, so being a collector is a fun little thing while we travel this world. I mean, every night, it’s something else. The other night, I head-banged a dude on my rental car and drove him through the curtain in my rental car. So some moments are not as good as others, but they are all fun, that’s for sure.

I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.

I’m glad about ‘The Curtain Call’ now, but I remember being very confused watching it all go down because I was right there behind the curtain watching it all, and I couldn’t believe these guys were breaking kayfabe.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

PCB (Pakistan Cricket Board) is doing an unbelievable job in trying to resurrect international cricket. I just hope the World XI tour goes ahead and that will almost be the curtain raiser to, hopefully, get some international cricket back.

If you peek behind the curtain at any type of company, you’ll see that things are far less organized than you’d expect.

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

Why do we need to wait until somebody sells 10 million records to give people a show like that? What about us smaller, hungry folk? At least gimme a curtain!

Anybody who’s done standup will tell you that there’s nothing like it. The show starts at 8:00, the curtain goes up and there’s nobody else except you and the audience, and you just perform for them for two hours. Nobody yells, ‘Cut!’ There are no retakes. That is still the most exciting medium for me, and I love it.

The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.

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

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.

I come from the theater, so I like it being: curtain up, this is what we want you to see, we have a reason for showing it to you, and then the curtain comes down, and that’s it.

I don’t want to live in a militarised country behind an iron curtain. It’s boring. Been there and seen the movie. I’ve done that.

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.

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

The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power.

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

I’ll give you my worst nightmare. I’m dreaming that I’m onstage, the curtain goes up, and I have no idea what my lines are or what’s going on. I think I should know, I kind of know, I remember rehearsing… and the audience is there waiting.

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!

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.

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.

Hurried and worried until we’re buried, and there’s no curtain call, Lifes a very funny proposition after all.

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.