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I believe so much in the power of performance I don't want to convince people. I want them to experience it and come away convinced on their own. (Marina Abramovic)
Theatre is fake: The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. (Marina Abramovic)
The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways. (Ansel Adams)
The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. (Stella Adler)
I have no idea what I'm doin'. I've never seen me. (Mose Allison)
The best thing about the term 'performance artist' is that it includes just about everything you might want to do. (Laurie Anderson)
Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words. (Laurie Anderson)
The thing that's characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage. (Laurie Anderson)
When you record, you live with what you recorded for many many years, but when you play it's just an hour and a half and then once it's over it's over. (Keren Ann)
Remember this, that there is a proper value and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act. (Marcus Aurelius)
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall. (Marcus Aurelius)
I'm always about trying to fill a need with what I do in my artistry. There is definitely a need in the performing arts world for a movement to come along that seriously connects with a next generation audience while still maintaining the timeless artistic objectives present throughout the history of the American music tradition. (Jon Batiste)
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs. (Charles Baudelaire)
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. (John Berger)
Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown. (John Berger)
If you took acting away from me, I'd stop breathing. (Ingrid Bergman)
For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long then too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture. (Sarah Bernhardt)
Ladies and Gentlemen, this number is a number during which most people cough. (Victor Borge)
A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls. (Bertolt Brecht)
Let your performance do the thinking. (Charlotte Bronte)
Let your performance do the thinking. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)
-Playboy, 1984
The main thing about acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made. (George Burns)
The act of painting requires something of the split focus actors need when playing out a scene: soul-deep immersion in the moment tempered by a calculated awareness of stage, prop, lighting, audience, and everything else that ticks and breathes. (Brett Busang)
Theater takes place all the time, wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one that this is the case. (John Cage)
I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries. (Frank Capra)
I absolutely want to have a career where you make'em laugh and make'em cry. It's all theater. (Jim Carrey)
I brought the film like a flower to the world. (Claude Chabrol)
You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue. (Claude Chabrol)
I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more. (Marc Chagall)
Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act. (Leonard Cohen)
Just know your lines and don't bump into the furniture. (Noel Coward)
It's personalities, it's conflict, it's all of these things that actually make performers interesting. (Simon Cowell)
When you are doing a show, it can get really dull. You are sitting so long while they set up the lights, then you say a couple of lines, then they tear down the lights again. At least stunts are something that uses your physical energy a great deal. (Yvonne Craig)
Perform with elan, brilliance and dash – at concert pitch. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities. (Daniel Day-Lewis)
You're up there and you're grappling with the paradoxical dilemma of feeling at once silly and sublime, absurd and grand, and that makes one do interesting things, and lends itself to grandiose gestures and a sort of disbelief that your small, tiny words are really getting out there. (Gord Downie)
For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation. (Sergei Eisenstein)
Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life. (George Eliot)
There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Elite performers engage in 'deliberate practice' - an effortful activity designed to improve target performance. (Dr. K. Anders Ericsson)
An actor can do a play on Broadway for three years. Every night he's expressing the same emotion in exactly the same way. He has developed a technique to convey those feelings so that he can get the ideas across. Or a musician may not want to play that damn music at all, but he has a booking and has to do it. (Richard Estes)
The public has lost the habit of movie-going... The image it once held for us all - that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open - has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed? (Federico Fellini)
It's a trap I've fallen into earlier in my career - trying to be liked. Don't do it... Characters are flawed. Be unlikeable. Be flawed. Be a person. (Nathan Fillion)
I'm also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time. (Michael J. Fox)
The painting is always conceived as the linear record of a rhythmic gesture: it is a graph of a dance executed by the hand. Not only the artist's eye and hand perform this dance, so does the eye of the beholder. (Roger Fry)
Good storytelling is humanity's great connector, and it just might keep the world from eating itself. (James Genn)
-Sand and Foam
The only time a juggler / Appeals to me / Is when I see him / Miss the ball. (Kahlil Gibran)
Whenever you are playing or singing music, and you notice you're in a trying state, stop trying, and focus your awareness on a single element of your movement at a time. Observe your body, and watch it subtly shift to a more relaxed and accurate kind of performance. (Barry Green)
Success is very ephemeral. You depend entirely on the desire of others, which makes it difficult to relax. (Eva Green)
Acting is happy agony. (Alec Guinness)
As a busker, one thing that does not work is self-consciousness. A busker needs to be working. A busker needs to shed all ego and get down to work. Play your songs, play them well, earn your money, and don't get in people's way. (Glen Hansard)
Acting is the most minor of gifts... After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four. (Katharine Hepburn)
I know some people find the slow songs boring. I have felt that way myself. Lieder is such a high holy art but after all we are trying to entertain people! So I like to add something more amusing to the program, like the Ernest Charles songs. (Ben Heppner)
I've played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses - and that's probably enough for any man. (Charlton Heston)
I've acted with all types, I've directed all types. What you want to understand, as a director, is what actors have to offer. They'll get at it however they get at it. If you can understand that, you can get your work done. (Ron Howard)
I make 50 cents for showing up... and the other 50 cents is based on my performance. (Steve Jobs)
For me, music is so passionate, I have to give it my all every time I go onstage. Onstage, it was always comfortable for me, because that's where I felt at home. (Elton John)
The secret of staying fresh in a show is to remember that the audience you're playing for that night has never seen it before. (Danny Kaye)
I just feel my way through. If I had to give an acting class, I wouldn't know what to do. (Nicole Kidman)
The domain of the ballet dancer is not earth but air. (Lincoln Kirstein)
My plays are not diadactic... they simply express my attitude to my world. (Oskar Kokoschka)
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. (Stanley Kubrick)
Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life... (Ninon de L'Enclos)
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral. (H. L. Mencken)
It's all make believe, isn't it? (Marilyn Monroe)
Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results. (Marilyn Monroe)
Acting is therefore the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all. (George Moore)
- An American Prayer...
Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. (Jim Morrison)
We have assembled inside this ancient / and insane theatre / To propagate our lust for life / and flee the swarming wisdom / of the streets (Jim Morrison)
I played an artist in a comedy called 'Rooster.' It was a zany film by Glen Larson, a friend who produced several successful television series including 'Magnum PI.' (LeRoy Neiman)
Sometime, when you start thinking too much what an audience is going to think, when you're too self-conscious about it, you make mistakes. (Christopher Nolan)
Life turned out much better than I thought. I knew after a little while that I could act. (Peter O'Toole)
We used to have actresses trying to become stars; now we have stars trying to become actresses. (Sir Laurence Olivier)
Heaven be thanked, we live in such an age when no man dies for love except upon the stage. (John James Osborne)
I am the poet of the high wire - I never do stunts; I do theatrical performances. (Philippe Petit)
If a leaf fell from a tree, I'd stop juggling and play with the leaf. I went to my prop bag and got a little bandage and stuck the leaf back on the tree. People loved it. (Philippe Petit)
Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part, there all the honour lies. (Alexander Pope)
A tap dancer is really a frustrated drummer. (Eleanor Powell)
Be cocky. Walk into the Georgia Dome like you own it. (Mary Lou Retton)
In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and the rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words, we are continually changing the score. (Ralph Richardson)
At the end of each day you should play back the tapes of your performance. The results should either applaud you or prod you. (Jim Rohn)
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. (Harold Rosenberg)
The world is my stage, India is my green room. (Paul Sandip)
The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves. (George Santayana)
The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression - all of that is very important. (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
It's very good for me to remember what actors go through. (Martin Scorsese)
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. (William Shakespeare)
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed... music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it. (Dmitri Shostakovich)
I've had a couple of times on stage when I really felt free. (Nina Simone)
-Larry King Live, May 13, 1988...
You've got to be on the ball from the minute you step out into that spotlight. You gotta know exactly what you're doing every second on that stage, otherwise the act goes right into the bathroom. It's all over. Good night. (Frank Sinatra)
If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear. (Anna Deavere Smith)
All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists. (Stephen Sondheim)
We may have limped onto Broadway as the underdogs, but underdogs bite back occasionally. (Bernie Taupin)
To put what you see on paper is the same as funneling what you feel through yourself as a performer. (Rod Taylor)
Imagination! Imagination! I put it first years ago, when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success upon the stage. (Ellen Terry)
The necessity to constantly turn in an excellent performance, to be absolutely wedded to this dedication and this ideal means that as a child you're going to pay for it personally. (Twyla Tharp)
Only undertake what you can do in an excellent fashion. There are no prizes for average performance. (Brian Tracy)
Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent. (Horace Walpole)
Play your part in the comedy, but don't identify yourself with your role. (Wei Wu Wei)
The problem with our art form: it's so ephemeral, and catching performances can be so difficult... the important thing is what happens at the moment of performance, for the people who made the effort to be there: it lives with them. (Judith Weir)
I don't do well with snakes and I can't dance. (Robin Williams)
If I say, 'Oh nice,' about seven times in the same show, things aren't going well. (Oprah Winfrey)
The theater of my mind has a seating capacity of just one, and it's sold out for all performances. (Henry Winkler)
-Saturday Evening Post, 1962...
Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues. Ten minutes later you throw them away and they are gone. (Shelley Winters)
Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don't know that is what they're trapped by, their little script. (Tom Wolfe)
I rather go to see a good play than be in one. (Alfre Woodard)
O body swayed to music, / O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance? (William Butler Yeats)
Acting isn't just about remembering the words, it's about becoming them. (Miles Patrick Yohnke)
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