Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
Marcel Marceau
Mime is an art beyond words. It is the art of the essential. And you cannot lie. You have to show the truth.
It's good to shut up sometimes.
I don't want our youth to become anti-romantic. We have to make room for the soul.
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?
To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.
I have never been a victim of antisemitism - if you put to one side my war-time experience. That said, I am lucky not to have been sent into a concentration camp.
In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.
When you're in a play, 50 percent is the genius of the actor, 50 percent is the genius of the author. When a mime is not perfect, you see nothing.
All wars are criminal.
There is only one Marceau.
Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.
The great problem of humanity is life and death. Every person dreams of becoming invisible one day.
In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.
With time, art developed Bip, my alter ego. He was not only a lion tamer or a street musician but a soldier revealing the tragedy of ephemeral life.
Today, my heart and soul lives peacefully for the hope that the 21st century will have to face a great challenge, a peaceful struggle for the enlightenment of humanity.
Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.
I was brought up in a Jewish home, but I was brought up to be human - not fanatical, which is something that I don't appreciate at all. I learned to become a humanist and not to dwell on the differences between Jews and Christians.
Dance is in the air, pirouettes, very difficult. Mime is on the floor, like Spanish dancing perhaps, and very often in slow motion.
Silence in the turmoil of the theater world made me survive 50 years without speaking on a stage, only to say 'No' in Mel Brooks' film, 'Silent Movie.'
What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.
I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.
I am a company in myself. My repertoire has become a bible for all mimes in the world.
I wouldn't imagine I would become famous in America for my talk shows.
Bip is the romantic and burlesque hero for our time. Bip is a modern-day Don Quixote.
I started under my master, Etienne Decroux, who taught me a new grammar for mime he called statuary mime. This grammar brings style creations. Without it, no art survives.
