Quotes About Performance

Just know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

Life is a circus: you go in, bow, run around, bow again and leave.

Life is but a short and fevered rehearsal for a concert we cannot stay to give.

Often we concentrate on the process and forget the results.

A man's final query is determined by how well he acts under pressure. If man can control his demeanor under extreme stress, he will be judged in a positive way.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

A cool & diversified version of a mix tape. The BreakBeat Poets is a thorough and complete summation of Golden Era writers who continue to build the scene of literary and performance poetry.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that theater excels over film and TV in its ability to let people play with poetry.

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

And a lot of times in slam poetry I feel like people are so worried about the performance that the words might not be as strong.

[I've] learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body.

What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality.

Most true musicians don't do it for the money, they do it because they love it. When I did slam poetry, it was a great way for me to express myself, I loved it.

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams

The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.

Politics is show business for ugly people.