Quotes About Inspiration

Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors.

I remember walking onstage in the first performance, and something hit me like a brick wall, and I just knew at that moment that this is something I had to do for the rest of my life, and I've never looked back.

I have really musical parents, and my dad was always encouraging, but the desire to get onstage and perform really did come from me. I'd never push my future children.

I hope I'm Jessica Tandy, you know. I hope I'm onstage, and I fall over at 85 or something with everyone applauding thinking that it was a joke, you know, 'There she goes again,' and I'm just gone. I've gone to Heaven.

I don't sit and write stand-up material; I come up with an idea onstage.

I feel powerful when I'm onstage talking to an audience. I like communicating; it feels like my calling in the world. Knowing what you're meant to be doing with your life is pretty bloody powerful.

Those moments onstage when you realize what you and your compatriots are doing matters - someone in that room needs to hear that story, someone needs to escape or heal or learn or breathe, and remember, we're all in this together.

To be able to be onstage and to hear people in the audience go, 'That's my song!' It's amazing.

If you were 12, and Beyonce was up onstage saying to you, 'You get to do exactly whatever you want to do,' that would be awesome. I wish she said it to me when I was 12.

When you get new people around you, the excitement is new because they have different take on your music. They play it in a different way, and that's always exciting to be around. It elevates everybody onstage.

I've always tried to do things a little bit before they were being done by the mainstream. I challenge myself to do that in stand-up also, to talk about things that I'm not hearing anybody talk about onstage and in the media.

It's not about me. It's about what I'm doing for kids. When I walk out onstage, there's 15,000 kids that, to me, represent potential.

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

A concert is my experimentation time. I practice playing something several different ways, but in a concert, inevitably I get more ideas onstage, in that combination of focus and adrenaline, than I could ever get in the practice room.

When you know you have a good song, when you're onstage, even if it's just a weird, basic energy, you know your song is good.

A lot of people get a high from being onstage. I found ways to enjoy it. But I get it from being in the studio.

I saw a concert with Nena singing '99 Red Balloons' on TV and I said, 'I will also go onstage and sing.'

It's very important to me to give something back - to pass on my know-how, to give all the lessons I learned onto the next generation so they don't make the same mistakes.

When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something.

I'm an artist with a message, and my message is more for society, casting the mirror onto them and saying, 'Hey, this is what we look like, what are we going to do about it, how are we going to use what we've been through to aid where we're going.'

The Yardbirds sort of disbanded, and I was disappointed because I thought what we were doing was really good. I thought we were really onto something. I thought I was really onto something with these ideas that I had.

We were always in church, and always singing, so once I realized that music was something that I had a knack for, I sort of latched onto it, and it helped give me an identity and figure out who I was as a person. It informed my way into theater, which informed my way into television.

To walk into a studio, for me, is just like walking onto a beach or something.

I hold onto the spirit of God for everything, and that works for me. That aspect of my life is very real and is the truth.