Quotes About Performance

I have four or five custom suits, including one that's velvet, and a gray one I wear onstage. It's wool.

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

The kindest word to describe my performance in school was Sloth.

The word diva to me means doing something supernatural with something natural.

I find Shakespeare terrifying. When Simon Russell Beale does a speech, I understand every word of it, but if I did the same speech, people would be going, 'Huh? What?'

I'm no diva but I can be annoying in a recording studio. Of course I try to be a diva in terms of confidence of performance and owning a song but I've never behaved like one in terms of the negative connotations of the word.

Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing - if I respect the song. If I cannot project this to a listener, I fail.

When people see my show, they may not laugh out loud as they do with some of the classic comedians, but they do enjoy it. I regret that I called it comedy to begin with; I should have called it 'An Evening With' or put it down as spoken word. But the emphasis is always on funny stories.

Look up the word role in the dictionary and you'll see it means playing a part. That's why I call myself a real model.

I think you can develop your ability to be clutch, if that's the word that you will use, your ability to focus and to be able to block out all the external stuff.

Stage is the place of the playwright: you're guided by great actors and directors, but it's the playwright's word on the page that counts.

To be an entertainer, you gotta be a little gutsy, a little egotistical, so you have to pull back sometimes when people say, 'Well, he's stuck-up.' 'Stuck-up' is only another word for self-conscious.

The word thank you ain't enough. You've got to show it, so just go out there and play at a higher level, and instead of saying thank you, show it.

One word that seems to connect both leaders and employees is: 'outcomes.' Built into that word is the implicit and explicit understanding and agreement that effective actions lead to good outcomes; ineffective actions lead to poor outcomes.

If you break down most rock songs and look at the lyrics on a piece of paper, it's all about melody. It's all about presentation. And a lot of bands are really great, but you can't understand a word of what they say.

I wouldn't call myself at all as a crossover artist - I kind of hate that word - but in a way, you need to see me like that, because I'm working in classical music, I'm doing these other projects, and I'm having a rock career at the same time.

Impressions are still kind of hard for me and not what I love to do the most, but with characters, I think there's an element of fearlessness. You try to figure out the best reading and wording of the jokes before the show, and then you just really have to go hard.

Talking isn't doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

Every time I step on stage an' see all of the lights or hear fans singing the words to my songs ,it's a surreal moment for me.

I want to make people cry even when they don't understand my words.

Christine and the Queens

Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.

Memorizing lines isn't really hard. Only with really hard words and stuff.

Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.