Quotes About Performance

I realized I do tragedy better than comedy.

As an actor, you can do everything. I grew up in the theater, and you could do a musical, a comedy, a tragedy.

I often find in doing tragedy, or doing very serious material, that there's a level of anxiety that builds that often leads to laughter in some cases. In between takes, there can often be a lightness.

The terrible tragedy for every director is to watch an actor do what you want and not have the camera rolling - and never get it back again. So I always try to roll the camera before anybody's really ready.

When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called 'Fawlty Towers.'

A comic book and a straight drama all have the same elements. If you're playing tragedy, you have to be aware of the comedy; if you're playing comedy, you have to be aware of the tragedy. If you're playing comic book, you have to be aware of the reality.

Tragedy is the oldest form of theatre.

I think comedy's harder to pull off on the screen than on the stage, anyway. Tragedy is easier on the screen... oddly enough.

Whenever I'd seen Greek tragedy done with masks and declamations, it brought me out in a rash.

Chuck Lorre and everyone else on 'Mom' did such a great job of balancing that line that rides tragedy and comedy. They make you cry, and then they make you crack up about it.

I never did comedy or tragedy. I just live a situation and my mission is to entertain people.

At Juve you were first or you were nothing. If we went out of the Champions League it was a tragedy. I saw team-mates who did not eat for a week.

I think my strength as a performer is my ability to straddle the fence between comedy and tragedy.

If your timing is not correct then comedy will become tragedy.

I've had tragedy in my life, but I think that gives me a depth that I can bring to my work. I'd like to see more older women on TV because they can bring that life experience and emotion to a performance.

Marie Cornelie Falcon, who lost her voice while performing - singing the line 'Je suis pret' - 'I am ready.' How much more tragic can you get?

It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work - the night watchman.

I had - after I sang the 'Star Spangled Banner' so badly, after my tragic singing accident, after that, you know, all my stuff kind of, like, really got even more full blown and, you know, I got stage fright and, you know, I couldn't do stand-up anymore and let alone sing and all the other things.

There's something about Michael J. Fox that I loved when he did all the '80s stuff. His way of performing all the physicality, which is why it's so tragic now, but the way he used his body so much as well, I loved.

When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.

I like this other world, this forgetting of myself. The actor works in order to escape, not to find himself. You become an actor by leaving yourself, and then you have to keep acting. How tragic!

I think 4 percent growth is a good goal. And I think the fact that we have become used to an economy that sort of putt putts along between 1 and 2 percent is sort of tragic.

I love the tragic side. I don't do 'happy' onstage. I like the dark, the disturbed.

Ohio has long been an embarrassment to charter-school supporters nationwide, with its trail of scandal and graft and abysmal student performance.