Quotes About Performance

I guess you could say I've been in my share of violent movies.

I have never been in a violent movie or television show.

I always found the Chicago audience to be a smart, fast-moving, violent and cheerful lot, and it's always good to be back.

Say the average arena is 20,000 people. You're in the very center of that arena, and you're playing to the worst seat in the house up there. So everything is very big, very large. It's like a very violent form of Broadway in a 20x20 ring.

Violet Chachki - I'm a huge fan of her work.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

Acting is just playing the violin in an orchestra. Directing is being the conductor.

The only downside to playing the violin is that you never know when you're going to be asked to play. I could be out to dinner or having a drink at a bar, and someone could just give me a violin, and I've got to be ready to play.

There's a million people who can go out and play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto brilliantly, but we're the only ones who can do 'A Little Nightmare Music.'

I played violin and got into that Suzuki program in the second grade.

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story.

I wasn't making it with the violin because I was playing all of the 'long hair' stuff.

The violin sings.

I do use an electric violin. Actually, my regular electric violin, which I sometimes use, is by Ned Steinburger.

When I started learning the violin, my choir teacher thought I could sing. But when I first got on stage, I froze!

Of course the most difficult thing on the violin is always intonation. The second one is rhythm. If you play in tune, in time with a good sound that's already high level. Those three are the main things.

It was really amazing. I mean, he'd never mentioned that he played in the symphony, like serious violin playing, not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.

Working with a bunch of actors is like trying to tune each violin.

I learned, too, how it was possible with the help of the picture and action to transform an apparently insignificant violin passage into an incident, and to lift a simple horn call into a thing of stupendous significance by means of scenic emphasis.

You know, if you really want to fiddle the old-time way, you've got to learn the dance. The contra-dances, hoedowns. It's all in the rhythm of the bow. The great North Carolina fiddle player Tommy Jarrell said, 'If a feller can't bow, he'll never make a fiddler. He might make a violin player, but he'll never make no fiddler.'

When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.

I have this weird musical thing I do: I play violin, and I even went on tour with Tim Robbins. We did a bunch of Canadian cities, and then went down to the States, and then we ended up in Japan.

My fourth birthday, I was given a violin, and my fifth birthday, a guitar. I didn't start to play until I saw Hendrix on TV. They showed him setting his guitar on fire and burning it for the Monterey Pop Festival.

I sometimes use a girl singer the way Henny Youngman uses his violin - as a bridge between one laugh and the next.