Quotes About Performance

Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.

The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.

I don't have any writers. I never get a laugh with somebody else's jokes. I can't do it justice.

There is no 'magic water' that you can rub on a script to make the jokes funnier.

If somebody said about me, 'I don't think his jokes are good, I don't think he's a good comedian,' I don't like to read that but that's a fair thing to say.

Early on, I had a girlfriend come see me, and she was like, 'Yeah, it was good, but you were funny at a dining hall at the University of Maryland.' That's when I realized I was contrived. I was reciting jokes. So I really worked on - no matter what - sounding like I was just talking to the people.

Going on stage is a performance, it's an act; you're playing a version of yourself. I don't give it a lot of thought. I clock on, I tell jokes, I clock off again.

It's hard for a comic to be joking when your lines can't be funny.

Siamo gli attori ingenui su una scena di un palcoscenico misterioso e immenso.

So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process.

Being unhappy alone isn't all that much fun, but what's even tougher is playing one's part without forgetting one's lines, coping with other people's compassion, their comments, being there with the right line when they give the cue.

Bring down the curtain, the farce is played out.

The goal of education is understanding; the goal of training is performance.

Boxing is just show business with blood.

Due to a combination of dispositional characteristics and personal performance histories, functional performers typically expect positive performance outcomes, and dysfunctional performers typically expect negative performance outcomes. Over time, these beliefs become strongly held and difficult to change. In addition, these belief sets can become self-fulfilling because they affect how the performer interprets challenge or threat in performance situations (Sbrocco & Barlow, 1996). For

A good athlete always mentally replays a competition over and over, even in victory, to see what might be done to improve the performance the next time.

Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing - if I respect the song. If I cannot project this to a listener, I fail.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Confidence... thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.

My own mask stayed just where it ought. I've had lots of practice.

Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.

Their earlier poor performance had had more to do with the way they were tested than with their mental powers. Elephants

Since the average person fears public speaking more than death, subjects in a study were asked to address an audience.

Incentives were important in attracting a candidate to accept a particular job, but once on the job it hardly mattered at all. People who are driven to perform do so based on internal drive, not on external incentives. They want to do a good job.