Quotes About Performance

Baseball players, for example, are notoriously superstitious.

Here come the guests. Keep calm, now, and we'll go on playing our old roles.

I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror

Theatre is the most perfect artistic form of coercion.

The theater itself is not revolutionary: it is a rehearsal for the revolution. ~ Augusto Boal

The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!). ~ Augusto Boal

I have only one rule in acting--trust the director, and give him heart and soul.

She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down-keep down-slow down-don't do your best, it is not wanted!

It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.

She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance.

I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.

There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day.

They liked working in a company that valued action and results.

In one job, his boss always seemed to criticize him for what he did wrong and never noticed all the things he did right.

I do not do schtick. What I do are organized routines and connected schtick— schtick upon schtick upon schtick until we have a piece of carpentry

While she couldn't deliver a comic routine to save her life, she had a well-developed ability to look blank and confused, and she found to her surprise that she enjoyed the laughter.

Acting is in everything but the words.

Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.

When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.