Quotes About Brecht

“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.”

— David Nicholls

“Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a while day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them?”

— David Nicholls

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

— Katy Mixon

“You couldn't escape the literary atmosphere in our home. I grew up as a Britisher. I played a protagonist of every nationality in stage adaptations of Shakespeare and Brecht. I graduated from Yale. When I moved to the U.S., I realized with some amount of surprise that I was seen as an ethnic actor.”

— Satya Bhabha

“Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as "great literature" by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Justin Kirk

“Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political knowledge in remarkable ways, and was an outspoken, radical opponent of the war, its nationalism and its capitalism”

— Harold Bloom

“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.”

— Orlando Bloom

“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.”

— David Antin

“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.”

— Marianne Faithfull

“Food comes first and then morality
Bertolt brecht”

— Bertolt Brecht

“Von der Freundlichkeit der Welt (Bertold Brecht 1921)
Auf die Erte voller kaltem Wind
Kamt ihr alle als ein nacktes Kind.
Frierend lagt ihr ohne alle Hab
Als ein Weib euch eine Windel gab.
Keiner schrie euch, ihr wart nicht begehrt
Und man holte euch nicht im Gefaehrt.
Hier auf Erden wart ihr unbekannt
Als ein Mann euch einst nahm an der Hand.
Von der Erde voller kaltem Wind
Geht ihr all bedeckt mit Schorf und Grind.
Fast ein jeder hat die Welt geliebt,
Wenn man ihm zwei Haende Erde gibt.”

— Bertolt Brecht

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

— Lotte Lenya

“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.”

— Bertolt Brecht

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

— Nina Hagen

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

— Nina Hagen

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

— Alain Badiou

“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.”

— Eugene Ionesco