Quotes About Performance

So I have always remembered from this experience that people's performance is a response to who they perceive themselves to be for us at the moment.

Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

My most persistent memory of stand - up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford.

I opened the show with this line: I have decided to give the greatest performance of my life! Oh, wait, sorry, that's tomorrow night.

It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.

In my opening seconds, I would say, It's great to be here, then move to several other spots on the stage and say, No, it's great to be here! I would move again: No, it's great to be here!

Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.

teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

Let's suppose that you want to say, I am a jerk. IN the 18th century, you would have to go around person to person and utter the phrase individually to each one of them. However, here in the third millennium, with our advances in telephone communication, it is possible to say I am a jerk to a thousand people at a time by forgetting to turn off your cell phone and having it ring during a performance of Death of a Salesman.

They told me to just act like myself. When I said, How do I do that? they said to just have fun with it, but I'm not sure what they meant.

Doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.

Enjoyment while performing was rare—enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. After the shows, however, I experienced long hours of elation or misery depending on how the show went, because doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.

Now that I had assigned myself an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing

I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years.

might try for a doctorate in philosophy and become a teacher, as teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

Did not go well at mall. Passerby said, "how's the screenplay goin', Steve?" Worried about tomorrow's performance on CSI… and Emmy.

Because it's a poor tradeoff to add complexity for dubious performance gains, a good approach to deep vs. shallow copies is to prefer deep copies until proven otherwise.

in the vast majority of systems, efficiency isn't critical.

You save time when you don't need to have an awards ceremony every time a C statement does what it's supposed to. Moreover

Brilliance is encouraged but optional. Competence, however, is mandatory.

Essentially there are two actions in life: Performance and excuses. Make a decision as to which he will accept from yourself.

What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?

But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education. If these home-based inputs are lacking, there is only so much a school can do.

Mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.