Quotes About Performance

I can really serve the audience instead of making this about me and about serving myself and my pocketbook.

I think if I just do what I do every day, on the extraordinary Olympic stage, I could be a podium contender.

If you talk to most athletes, the place you're most comfortable is your playing field. I'm not so comfortable at a podium or talking about events.

I never think about records. I focus on my race and try to get onto the podium consistently. It's hard enough to do that.

Fourth is the worst position to finish. You just missed the podium.

I don't think I need to stand on a podium and say what kind of performance I've given in 'Yatra' or any other film.

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

My parents' generation was definitely pre-telly, and they knew how to entertain each other. Everybody knew something that they could do - a song or a poem, or a piece of music. At school, I remember being a cat and then a budgie and then a bumble bee. I obviously thought all that was marvelous.

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.

I've approached every character I've ever played with a poem, first and foremost.

When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it's about, how it works, how it's constructed and so on. If you write a poem alongside it, to complement it, you start to feel poetry's method, poetry's way of looking at things.

You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied literally by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.

Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.

I would like to talk about poems like I talk about football.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.

I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

I have to thank my mother for this. When I was a little boy she used to teach me poems. I would go in church and tell the poems in church for the Easter program, and again for Mother's Day and any occasion she felt would fit. I was very energetic with delivery at that time as a boy, so it stuck with me.

An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.

When I finished high school, I didn't have much direction - I was a Deadhead kid who ended up bumming around London seeing a lot of theater. That's where I saw the performance that made me want to act: Vanessa Redgrave doing 'A Touch of the Poet.'

No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

Poets are like the decathletes of literature.