Quotes About Performance

Obviously, I'm going to go out there and want to win. Don't get me wrong. But I'm not going to not have fun or not enjoy myself at the same time.

As long as everyone does their part - the attackers score the goals, and the defenders keep the clean sheets - then you can't go too wrong.

But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn't, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.

The stigma with country is it's not cool. That's wrong. Country is very cool. I look at award shows, I look at how country is represented. Country is represented with an asterisk. We have to perform collaborations. We have to perform a tribute. We can't perform by ourselves.

The learning curve on soaps is through the roof because it's a three-camera setup. There's a master and then there's two singles. And the great thing about soaps, and soap actors will tell you, is that when you get your line wrong, they don't re-shoot it. They just cut to the person listening.

I've had some bad gigs, don't get me wrong.

In film or on stage, in reflecting life through art, an actor has a second take or another day with his or her performance if something goes wrong. Bullfighters are spies crossing into enemy lines. Any mistake, no matter how minor or trivial, is potentially fatal.

Don't get me wrong. I don't take anything for granted. But it seems like the better I play, the more attention I get. And I can't get away from it. You play great, you get attention. But I hate attention. It is weird. I'm in a bind. The more you win, the more they come.

I won't say doing 'Jai Ho' was a wrong decision. People said I was camera-friendly and the film had some truly big names.

My dad's pretty funny. He's funny for all of the wrong reasons. The first time I did standup at Edinburgh he sat in the front row and wore sunglasses because he didn't want to put me off.

A comic's like anybody else - he does what he does to support himself and feed his family. But if a comic says the wrong thing, there's a chance the audience will want to take you down.

I actually felt bad because I was dunking the ball so much. I led the league in dunks one year, and they told me that was the wrong thing to do.

Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.

A lot of the stuff that I've done has been more drama and less comedy. I've had some opportunities to do some comedy, and I've often wanted to do that because it fits with me very comfortably because I talk too much, and I'm always saying the wrong thing all the time.

Most businesses fail because they want the right things but measure the wrong things, and they get the wrong results.

As an actor, you can't just be in the film. You're also in charge of selling it, and so you have to sell yourself, and you have to be very political and make sure to not say the wrong things. It's exhausting.

Being on the road has about 2 1/2 hours a day that are really great, and that's when you're onstage. The other 21 1/2 hours are very boring... It becomes like a void, and we chose to fill it with all the wrong things.

I feel like I've definitely let some good finishes go because of pushing too hard at the wrong time.

So much of performing is a mind game. You're memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.

My nursery school did a production of 'The Three Little Pigs.' I played the third pig. When the wolf knocked on my door, I refused to get up and answer it because, to me, he was knocking the wrong way. I just lay there, snoring away on stage, fully immersed in my character. My dad turned to my mom and said: 'Dustin Hoffman.'

You're here to sweat. This program is live. There's about one thousand million people watching you. So, you remember - one wrong word, one foolish gesture and your whole career could go down in flames. Hold that thought and have a nice night.

It was that famous joke: What's the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? 'Hey, I wrote a song.'

I was on 'Murder She Wrote' with Angela Lansbury. She was fantastic... she was lovely to everyone, she was always on time, prepared. Whereas when I worked with Bob Hope, he didn't know his lines. He had to have these huge big cards... he hardly said two words to me all day.

Once, when I was playing a nude scene in an indifferent play in New York, a critic wrote, 'Diana Rigg is built like a brick basilica with too few flying buttresses.' Do you think that's fair?