Quotes About Performance

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

My happiest times in the theater are when I do ensemble pieces. I really got into theater because of that closeness.

It's one of the things that looks good written down, but the reality is that you think about the pieces you're doing and try to bear in mind everyone in the audience.

I have composed several pieces which are performed outdoors, not only in the auditoria.

It's logical for us to sing, but not necessarily operatic pieces.

Pain is pain, joy is joy - you can't avoid bringing pieces of yourself into a role.

The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.

A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.

It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the '60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it feels more modern to me.

On game day, if I eat fruit - I usually eat fruit in the mornings - I have to have three pieces of cantaloupe, three pieces of pineapple. Everything's in threes.

I did a production called 'Classical Savion,' where I did some Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Bach, Vivaldi, and all these great pieces.

I want to write theater pieces, opera, or some kind of amalgamation where there is singing, music and theater.

It's hard to say what you learn acting a part. You find bits and pieces of yourself that are inside the character you play. You locate the relatable aspects of that character to your own life. So, in a way, every part you play forces you to discover things about yourself you might not have learned otherwise.

It was tough to try to be serious in front of Halle Berry and Pierce Brosnan with all this stuff in my face. There's never been a character that's looked this extreme.

What happens a lot in film, though not so much in the theatre, is that you get stroked and sort of massaged, like a little guinea pig.

I was in the play 'Fat Pig in the West End,' which is a comedy but has dramatic moments.

If I was a pig to work with I would never get asked back.

I love casting against type and doing things you wouldn't expect, because I think you get more interesting performances that way. Hollywood loves to pigeonhole people, and there's nothing an actor loves more than to do something different.

You can watch actors create their illusions, but if you don't see where they get the pigeons from, you don't really know how they're doing it.

I do Kathak, Pilates. I run.

I wrote probably my phattest banging record with Knife Party: 'Pile Driver.'

If your church is the theatre, New York means a lot - it's a pilgrimage you want to make.

There's not a pill or an injection that's going to give me, going to give any player the hand-eye coordination to hit a baseball.

For me, theatre and cinema are both pillars of an actor's life; I'd feel very half-baked if I was only doing one and not the other.