Quotes About Performance

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it

Shiny musical instruments wailed, their mouths open like lilies.

whole time. Partway through the night he began to keep so ostentatiously

Bed is the poor man's opera.

I am playing the violin, that's all I know, nothing else, no education, no nothing. You just practice every day.

When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don't feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in.

He pours the drinks for the lost dreamers, eternally swabbing the bar while listening to their stories, ever listening, and, yes, in the end has his own tale. It is my chance to give the performance of a lifetime. After all, I know the character by heart.

It is true what they say: without an audience, a storyteller is just some guy talking to himself.

Tennis is not like other sports where the coach is hired by an independent entity, and that makes a huge difference in the dynamic.

A good actor is someone who knows how to take the part and make it real and make it honest and be effective in it. If it's in a funny movie and, as long as they are cast in an appropriate way, humor will come from it.

It has been argued that British girls are incapable of deep feeling or brilliant acting owing to their lack of temperament. This, I am positive, is not true.

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.

I love movies with spectacle but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn't have to be a creature.

The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.

Take a quick wrestler, get them tired, and they aren't as quick. Take a technical wrestler, get them tired, and they aren't as technical. No matter what kind of wrestler, everyone is afraid of getting tired. It's those who learn to perform when they're tired that find success

There is nothing remarkable about it, all one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

There is nothing more gorgeous than being in a room with a play or watching someone on a stage delineate the human condition.

She knew that people generally behaved only as well as they had to.

I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.

What I want to give in the theatre is beauty, that's what I want to give.

Acting can be a narrow and isolated experience, because you only examine your particular part.