These mime quotes will inspire you. Mime is the theatrical technique of suggesting action, character, or emotion without words, using only gesture, expression, and movement or using only gesture and movement to act out (a play or role).
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging mime quotes, mime sayings, and mime proverbs.
Famous Mime Quotes
- “Mime makes the invisible, visible and the visible, invisible.” ~ Marcel Marceau
- “The art of Mime encompasses all the feelings of the soul. The Dance, on the other hand, is essentially an expression of joy, a desire to follow the rhythms of the music.” ~ August Bournonville
- “Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities.” ~ Marcel Marceau
- “Chaplin made me laugh and cry without saying a word. I had an instinct. I was touched by the soul of Chaplin – Mime is not an imitator but a creator.” ~ Marcel Marceau
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“Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop.” ~ Marcel Marceau
- “If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?” ~ Steven Wright
- “In my opinion, animation is best when it communicates without words because it is the perfect medium through which to make shortcuts to meaning. When actors are not talking, just acting out, it looks kind of weird. But in animation, mime is constant, and you accept it.” ~ Signe Baumane
- “A mime is a terrible thing to waste.” ~ Marcel Marceau
- “Life is a cycle, and mime is particularly suitable for showing fluidity, transformation, metamorphosis. Words can keep people apart; mime can be a bridge between them.” ~ Marcel Marceau
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“To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.” ~ Marcel Marceau
- “Everybody uses mime and gesture in real life, though we don’t realize it. It’s very useful as a performance technique, though it can be boring to watch on its own.” ~ Anthony Daniels
- “If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent.” ~ Jess Walter
- “To me, acting is acting… I’d be happy working on a street corner in a mime troupe.” ~ Kelly McGillis
- “Love is a jeering mime.” ~ Kenneth Rand
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“What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.” ~ Marcel Marceau
- “I don’t understand why people take pictures of mimes. Everyone looks like a mime in a picture.” ~ Karl Pilkington
- “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t said something foolish. It is then that I realize the power of mime.” ~ Bob Saget
- “I worked with a mime coach. I did weapons training. I did weight training.” ~ Kristanna Loken
- “I guess it would fall into the stalker category more or less. I was being stalked by a mime – silent but maybe deadly. Somehow, this mime would appear on the set of ‘Bringing Out the Dead’ and start doing strange things. I have no idea how it got past security. Finally, the producers took some action and I haven’t seen the mime since. But it was definitely unsettling.” ~ Nicolas Cage
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“If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, and it hits a mime, does anyone care?” ~ Gary Larson
- “In a costume, you need very exaggerated body language – as you say, sort of mime-type skills.” ~ Warwick Davis
- “Last night I played a blank tape at full blast. The mime next door went nuts.” ~ Steven Wright
- “I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.” ~ Nick Harkaway
- “I’ve always liked walking; that’s one of my favorite things to do, and I try to walk every day. [In Washington, D.C.] I can’t walk outside, but we have the treadmill. And I walked eight miles at the ranch last weekend. Now I also lift weights, which is also great for bone strength. [Mrs. Bush mimes a biceps curl and laughs.] I’m very, very strong, actually.” ~ Laura Bush
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“That’s actually kind of scary. Sex with a mime. Do I have to pay extra to make sure you don’t do the trapped-in-a-box thing while we’re doing it?” ~ Suzanne Brockmann
- “I made my performance debut in New York City downtown on the Lower East Side in college doing awkward performance art as a go-go dancer at Lady Starlight’s Party. And I never thought that my love for mediocre performance art and bad mime would ever come to use in my career as an actor. But my fantasies came true and I got to play Maureen in Rent.” ~ Annaleigh Ashford
- “Nothing?Micheal! You’re ‘playing’!.IN PUBLIC? ‘That’s new?’ Claire whispered to shhane ‘He hasn’t played anywhere but our living room since-Teeth-in-neck mime ‘You know Oliver’ ‘Oh.’ Michael’s face was turning pink.’ just put it back, OK? It’s no big deal! Eve kissed him.” ~ Rachel Caine
- “When Beethoven went deaf, the mynah bird just used to mime.” ~ Graham Chapman
- “I used to do puppet theatre and also mime and musical theatre in Florida for competitions and festivals, which was great. I was very much involved in theatre when I was in college.” ~ Wesley Snipes
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“Mimes were invented to give magicians someone to look down on.” ~ Jamy Ian Swiss
- “Despite rumors to the contrary, a mime is actually a very satisfying thing to waste.” ~ Lev L. Spiro
- “I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of non-writing writer hatched by the movies – as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.” ~ Ben Hecht
- “It’s interesting – a lot of good actors are good mimes. But I’m terrible. If I tried to do an impression, nobody would know what I was doing.” ~ Christopher Walken
- “Don’t move,” said Sprockett.”Mimes don’t generally attack unless they are threatened.” ~ Jasper Fforde
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“When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes ballon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.” ~ Jimmy Fallon
- “Now, I had been frightened on several different occasions in my life. The most frightening of these involved an elevator and a mime.” ~ Brandon Sanderson
- “Yoga, unlike dance or mime, is not an expression of form for others to watch.” ~ T. K. V. Desikachar
- “Everyone knows there’s only one thing less welcome on a stage than a mime, and that’s a clown, because everyone knows that clowns eat people.” ~ Laurie Notaro
- “I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday… Mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.” ~ Stephen Fry
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“I don’t profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.” ~ David Bowie
- “My voice went recently, never happened before, off like a tap. I had to sit in silence for nine days, chalkboard around my neck. Like an old-school mime. Like a kid in the naughty corner. Like a Victorian mute.” ~ Adele
- “This being 1962, no one thought it odd to have a mime program on radio.” ~ Mark Lewisohn
- “If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?” ~ Brad Warner
- “A cop stopped me for speeding/ He said, ‘Why were you going so fast?’ I said, ‘See this thing my foot is on? It’s called an accelerator. When you push down on it, it sends more gas to the engine. The whole car just takes right off. And see this thing [mimes steering wheel]? This steers it'” ~ Steven Wright
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“Physical expression was my first language: Before I was an actor, I was a dancer, an acrobat, a mime, and a street performer.” ~ Denis Lavant
- “There is no one who can move and mime and clown-like Bill [Irwin]. And Aubrey Plaza, she gets to embody all these different characters. That’s what’s exciting about this show [X-men], is the unusual casting.” ~ Lauren Shuler Donner
- “(From the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime) He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many times before. With perfect misunderstanding, she interpreted his passivity as disdain. Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face. Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly.” ~ Peter Carey
- “The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.” ~ Philip K. Dick
- “Obviously, it’s designed by record company executives who want a cheap success, and they don’t want to give money to anybody and they don’t want to give contracts, so they’ve created this world of very bubbly teenagers who want to be “idols” and they think all they have to do is mime quite well and they’ve made it. … But it’s not the problem of the kids, it’s the problem of the record companies because it’s just an inexpensive way for them to have so-called, I won’t say “artists”, but erm…You’re nodding, you know what I mean.” ~ Steven Morrissey
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“I studied and performed and even taught mime years ago.” ~ Tom Bergeron
- “I was a mime. I’m not kidding. I went to Northwestern University and they have a mime company, so we did a lot of training and then a lot of mime shows around Chicago.” ~ Kerry Bishe
- “Following directly behind the bier were the servants who would, in earlier times, have been slaughtered at the graveside, along with a warrior’s horse. Musicians and torchbearers came next, with the rear taken up by the mimes- sinister, silent figures in wax masks modeled on dead members of the family.” ~ Catharine Arnold
- “At Columbus Circle, a juggler wearing a trench cloak and top hat, who is usually at this location afternoons and who calls himself Stretch Man, performs in front of a small, uninterested crowd; though I smell prey, and he seems worthy of my wrath, I move on in search of a less dorky target. Though if he’d been a mime, odds are he’d already be dead.” ~ Bret Easton Ellis
- “If you shoot a mime, do you need to use a silencer?” ~ Steven Wright
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“I used to be a narrator for bad mimes.” ~ Steven Wright
- “Going to the Far East was my first eye-opener to a world vastly different from my own. Then when I was 16 I lived in Paris for a year and studied mime. At 21 I went to Indonesia. I had planned to go for three months, but I stayed four years. I just got lost in the culture.” ~ Julie Taymor
- “The Musicians Union declared you couldn’t mime on Top Of The Pops, which is obviously impossible if you’ve got a studio-based record that you’d worked on for a year or something. And there were a lot of terrible performances. Because on Top Of The Pops, you were just thrown onstage.” ~ David Toop
- “I went to the University of Minnesota to study art. I left the university to come to New York and live in Soho. I got involved with like a small kind of like experimental theater-mime company and we discovered that Étienne Decroux, a great mime, was still teaching in Paris so I went to study with him for several years.” ~ Jessica Lange
