Performance Quotes

The power of doing any thing with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance. - Mr Darcy

That's where you can find things and modulate your performance and give the other actors something fresh to respond to. We've probably all worked with actors who when it's suddenly your close up, they get sleepy. I don't like that. It's selfish acting, and I won't tolerate it.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you-trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

My heart goes out to anyone who is making his first appearance before an audience of human beings.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

If you don't back it up with performance and hard work, talking doesn't mean a thing.

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.

Being relaxed, at peace with yourself, confident, emotionally neutral loose, and free-floating - these are the keys to successful performance in almost everything.

For an entertainer, part of the thing you do is just style. And the coke did help me get into great runs of pure form.

And, now, come to this spot Where the spotlight is hot And you'll see in the spotlight A Juggling Jott Who can juggle some stuff You might think he could not... Such as twenty-two question marks, Which is a lot. Also forty-four commas And, also, one dot! That's the kind of Circus McGurkus I've got!

I have always cautioned partners that I considered three years a minimum in determining whether we were "performing".

There's an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

When you run a race, you hurt your ability to compete when you turn your head to look at the competition chasing you, you lose a step physically and psychologically. Run the race always stretching to do your best, imitations will come in last, no one can catch an original.

I love all those girls the same as they love me. I get thousands of letters a week from girls who love me.... Every time I sing a song, I make love to them. I'm a boudoir singer.

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

If you are not the best, then pretend you are

It's very intense to be in front of a live audience. It's just an amazing experience. It's dangerous. Everything out there is heightened. The bad stuff is extra-worse. The silences are extra-silent. The good stuff is amazing. It's electric when you walk out there. For 90 minutes, you're on this other planet.

When you're a great finisher, you'll become popular. Joe Louis was a great finisher.

Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

I wear a hat on stage so that people won't be blinded by the reflection from my head. Also, if I don't wear a hat, there's no way that the hat can be at that level by itself on the stage.

My preference is live performance, because you get the feedback. There's an energy. It's live theater. That's why I think actors like that.

But in my mind, I don't think there's any question Sidney Crosby is the best all-around player in the game. His hockey sense is so strong and so solid, combined with his God-gifted talent of being able to see the ice, see the entire picture in front of him. And, most importantly, I don't care how good you are, if you don't have a work ethic, it doesn't matter. There's no question that each and every game, he's one of the hardest-working guys on the ice. In my mind, he's the best player in the game today.

I love acting. I love stage work, more than anything. It's just live. It's right there in front of you. If you make a mistake, they know it and you know it. I won't do anything where I feel like I'm just making a fool out of myself. By doing that, I'm able to rise to my highest potential.

I never needed Panavision and stereophonic sound to woo the world. I did it in black and white on a screen the size of a postage stamp. Honey, that's talent.

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

Comedy, I figured, was the thing that came to me the most easily. Playing the trumpet and piano took practice. I thought that was a waste of time. I'd go out on the street corner and be funny. In a minute.

The music game is more than just my love for singing, its a sport for me.

Historically, actors have been made very famous for roles that were something that was far - - Richard Widmark comes to mind (playing Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death") or something like that, where you do some famous role and everybody imitates you for the rest of your life. But obviously it's much more fun to play something you're not than it is to play something you are.

By the next one [albom],Occupation: Foole, I was right back into the trip again. I'm more frantic, more breathless. You can hear how sick I am. If you want to see a cokehead, just look at the pictures on the Occupation: Foole album.

I'm just a singer/songwriter and entertainer and I miss people and the energy of the crowd. When I play live it's a lovefest with me and my audience. It's how I get my rocks off.

The way you see yourself today will affect your performance today.

I get an audience personally involved in a song - because I'm involved myself. It's not something I do deliberately: I can't help myself. If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel.

An entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself. An artist is on a journey: they don't know where they're going, what is going to happen, but they know they are not there yet, and there is some continuity and growth. I think of myself as an entertainer: I'm a performing entertainer, I'm a stand-up comic. But there's an artist at work here, too. One who interprets his world through his own filter.

You fight like you train.

When an audience does not complain, it is a compliment, and when it does, it is a compliment, too, if unaccompanied by violence.

Actors know, with me they aren't going to be allowed to rehearse a scene for a couple of hours and then get away with doing 25 takes before we get it right. So they come with their full bag of tricks.

No cop was ever born who wasn't a sucker for a finely-executed high-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges.

Promising is the very air o' th' time; it opens the eyes of expectation. Performance is ever duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will or testament which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it.

I laugh all the time - at things, people, stuff, whatever. But, I don't laugh onstage because then it's serious business.

What gets measured gets managed.

Teams do not go physically flat, they go mentally stale.

Only sing - don't do cheap songs, don't do silly songs, just do, just do wonderful songs that are well-written.

Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

When your confidence goes up, your competence goes up the same time.

You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad - if you're indifferent, Endsville.

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.

At Real, psychological pressure on the players is much more serious than at United. This is good. At many clubs, you don't know the consequence of playing badly.

When you're singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It's happening.

In truth I never really liked any of the heavy drugs, because normally my energy is up when I'm performing, and that's about it. Cocaine is nothing new. It's the pressure, I think. People use it to relieve that, and for me it is about getting numb and forgetting. I have a reverse metabolic reaction to the stuff.

I am God's vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting

Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?"

An actor should be judged by his performance only.

It's kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

Stand-up is an art but since it's humor and it's funny - a lot of guys that don't think it's art are probably coming from the angle that they don't want to take it so seriously. I've always looked at it as an art but I don't look at it as a pretentious art. I understand it has to be taken lightly because it is just comedy in the end, but the good stand-up comics are someone with something to say.

I grew up in New York wanting to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio.

Your thinking today determines your performance today.

If I had stood at the free-throw line and thought about 10 million people watching me on the other side of the camera lens, I couldn't have made anything. So I mentally tried to put myself in a familiar place. I thought about all those times I shot free throws in practice and went through the same motion, the same technique that I had used thousands of times. You forget about the outcome. You know you are doing the right things. So you relax and perform.

You'd be surprised how much being a good actor pays off.