Quotes About Performance

Most recently we've been working in concert situations rather than clubs. because there aren't too many rooms there like Ronnie Scott's, that are pure music rooms, where people come specifically to listen to music.

I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.

He's not lazy. He's just highly inefficient.

Both Averill and Bayar were like actors speaking lines for their audience and not to each other.

But music-good music-was by nature an intimate act.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

I cannot give a single concert at which I do not play one piece after the other in an agony of terror because my memory threatens to fail me. This fear torments me for days beforehand.

Así como nadie le enseñaría un día a morir: seguramente un día moriría como si antes se hubiese estudiado de memoria la representación del papel de una estrella. Pues en la hora de la muerte las personas se vuelven brillantes estrellas de cine, es el instante de gloria de cada uno y es como cuando en el canto coral se oyen agudos silbantes.

As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument.

I know what I am doing here: I'm improvising. But what's wrong with that? improvising as in jazz they improvise music, jazz in fury, improvising in front of the crowd.

Na vida nós somos artistas de uma peça de teatro absurdo escrita por um Deus absurdo.

I feel that I'm at my best as a person and that I'm coming home when I walk on to a set, or on to a stage, so if I can perform in one way or another I think I'll be okay.

To play the violin it is necessary to possess certain habits, skills, knowledge, and talents, to be in the mood to play, and (as the old joke goes) to have a violin. But violin playing is neither the habits, skills, knowledge and so on, nor the mood, nor . . . the violin.

We do not put value on the words that we speak if we cannot perform the words that we unleash.

I do make an attempt to always get that first take…. You're not stepping up to bunt. You're stepping up to hit the damn thing.

You always want to quit while you are ahead. You don't want to be like a fighter who stays too long in the ring until you're not performing at your best.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

When he was asked about the technical secret of his jump, he said:

Of a young actress: "She is pretty, and tactfully concerned that the optical pleasure she provides shall not be disturbed by technical requirements any more than necessary.

the American-affiliated students were incomparably better informed than the locals—incomparably more intelligent all round, to put it bluntly—but the one thing the Americans could not do to save their lives was recite the verse in front of them.

Asking you to play someone you're not is like asking King Kong to play the Moonlight Sonata.

I'd like to do a film which is funny.

D-Day was my first time in combat. I was mentally prepared and felt that I had done everything necessary to prepare myself for this precise moment. And yet you never know if you will measure up as a leader until the minute arrives when you face the enemy for the first time. Baptism by fire is a soldier's sacrament. There is always doubt. Hopefully, in combat, you perform as you train.

With soldiers, a leader develops a sense about which soldiers you can trust. You look for the soldiers who perform consistently. That is generally no more than fifteen percent of an organization. Solid leadership and association with your top performers can influence another seventy percent of your unit.