Quotes About Performance

In opera, as with any performing art, to be in great demand and to command high fees you must be good of course, but you must also be famous. The two are different things.

I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.

Back in the 1960s, I saw Peter, Paul and Mary. I was at that age, about 14, and I was mesmerized.

The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

When they were all ready, Halpern again counted them in, and the lyrical clarinet line floated over the strings and, Max felt, out of the open window and on, out and out over the hot, dusty July city like summer rain.

Excel at quality of work, speed of delivery or convenience

To sing a wrong note is insignificant, but to sing without passion is unforgivable.

To make a mistake is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable.

To play without passion is inexcusable!

To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.

The guitar is a miniature orchestra in itself.

If one treats men like cattle, one cannot squeeze out of them more than cattle-like performances.

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period.

What do parents look like? You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.

oriental marionette imitating an occidental gesture.

We may stick out the tongue (usually to the side) as we focus assiduously on a task (for example when basketball great Michael Jordan goes up for a dunk)

Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.

Adam senses a large weariness in him, the weariness of an old actor in the middle of a long run in an old part.

lay loooo-yah! A-layyyy-loo yah!" He had abandoned his tenor and was singing in a wavering falsetto.

Here's a tip though', he told me, leaning over and pressing a hand into my shoulder. 'If you want to improve your time, run faster.

Toxic shame, with its more-than-human, less-than-human polarization, is either inhuman or dehumanizing. The demand for a false self to cover and hide the authentic self necessitates a life dominated by doing and achievement. Everything depends on performance and achievement rather than on being. Being requires no measurement; it is its own justification. Being is grounded in an inner life that grows in richness.

The roles are like scripts given out for a play. They prescribe what feelings you can or cannot have. After playing my Hero role for years, I no longer really knew who I was.

The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.