Quotes About Performance

When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.

There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.

In sixth grade my teacher said that we had to do a talent show. You could sing or recite a poem... I went a wrote a little sketch for myself called 'Our Big World' about how many ways you could use a scarf.

When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.

I see my life flashing before me when I see people in the audience singing along to something I wrote in the '80s, and they're maybe standing next to someone who knows the more recent stuff.

I sat down one night and wrote the line rock, rock, rock everybody.

I'm a dramatist, so I really always wrote and directed at the same time because when I wrote something, I always put it on its feet. So I'm in love with actors; I always loved actors.

I wrote all the lyrics on 'Good Vibrations' and most of them in 'Kokomo.' 'Kokomo' was extremely popular and fun to sing - it's probably one of the bigger sing-along songs in our show. But then 'Help Me Rhonda,' 'Surfin' USA' and 'California Girls' and 'I Get Around' and 'Fun, Fun, Fun' are great songs as well.

I grew up in a time where on things like 'The Red Skeleton Show' or even to a certain extent on 'The Carol Burnett Show,' people wrote in the breakouts or ad-libs. They were scripted to look spontaneous. So I always had a dislike of that kind of thing.

Cole Porter wrote Anything Goes and four more hits for me.

When I play the first few notes of a song and people start screaming, I think: 'That's why I did this. That's why I wrote this song. That's a good job.' And it is a job.

I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren't as easy to sing.

I've always thought that whether I'm writing or not, I've gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they're mine. I'm not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I've gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.

I started writing songs when I was real young, when I was 3 years old. The piano spoke to me - I don't remember when I wasn't playing piano. My second grade talent show was the first time I performed my own thing. I dressed up as Dracula and played a song called 'Monster Rock' that I wrote. And I won.

We stand on our songs and we stand on the songs that we wrote for other people. That gives us a higher platform.

I wrote a play for Miu Miu called 'The Moment Is the Present, That's Why It's Called a Gift.' Instead of doing a catwalk show, all the actors wore the clothes and performed a 20-minute play.

I wrote 'Wish U Were Here' for Cody Simpson, and he invited me to perform with him on tour and be in his music video. He was shy at first. I think it's the surfer boy in him that makes him so mellow.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that's very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

When I wrote songs like 'Everyone I Love is Dead,' I never thought about how I was going to execute them live.

If I wrote a musical it wouldn't be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.

I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

From what I've been able to determine, many of our big stars are addicted to tobacco. They want to smoke in movies for the same reason I smoked as I wrote, which is that they think their performance is going to be better.

Practice, learn the lines, work hard, don't be too respectful. Sometimes we can get too hung up on the fact that the material of the play is very finely wrought language.

There is nothing like WWE live.