Quotes About Performance

I plan someday to do a one-man show based solely on the e-mails of Bellamy Young. And people will think I've written a brilliant comedy myself when, in fact, all the text will be directly from Bellamy.

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

You learn your text and have it in the back of your head, without a thought as to how you're going to say it.

Singing beautiful melodies is one thing, but to deliver the text so that the people understand it, even in a foreign language, has to be worked at very hard.

Honestly, I'm a shallow performer. I just go with the text and feel my way around it. There's not a whole lot of shaping.

I find it difficult to remember lines. When I'm doing a long speech for television, I sometimes have an earpiece with someone feeding me the text. But I can get by in the theatre if I study hard for a couple of months.

I live for the text. It's my job.

A film is different than a script. The text of the script is what it is.

If you look at Kirsten Dunst's performance in 'Melancholia,' which I think is absolutely wonderful - it's not even in the text, because she doesn't say much; it's all in her eyes. She doesn't have to explain what she's feeling. You just feel it.

Ultimately, as an actor, it comes down to committing to the text in the script.

You sit there, and you argue and you argue, and you sort of bully the hell out of the text until you're quite sure what it's revealing, and then you perform it.

A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.

What I don't find compelling is doing classical plays that everyone already knows - and people are following with the text in their hand because no one is listening.

When I agreed to play Ravana, I only had one condition that I get to modify the dialogues. One has to maintain the purity of the text, but the dramatization and the emotion behind it can be toyed with.

Jack Nicholson is a textbook actor who's very intuitive. He is absolutely brilliant at going as far as you can go, always pushing to the edge, but still making it seem real.

When I directed the 'Ring' cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York recently, there were people texting all through the show. But theatre isn't a communication device: it's a communion.

Many actors have protested about mobile phones going off in theatres, but the real menace now is people texting during a show. It may only disturb a few people around them, but for me, as an actor, when I spot them answering their emails, I am outraged.

What most infuriates me is the cell phones. If I see someone texting during the show, I walk off the stage.

I hate it when I see people texting at a show. And talking to each other. They're at a performance; they should respect the performer.

I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

To me, the most important elements in a theatre are the actors and the texts.

I'm a flutist so I know what they can deliver in terms of texture and sound and blurriness and softness. It's a very soft instrument.

If you taste something, you're not at the maximum of your ability. What I think about in competition is temperature and texture. It has nothing to do with taste or emotion.