Performers Quotes - Page 4

• Arrogant S.O.B.s run the world. A performer can never have too much self-confidence. The best in every field are likely to strike most people as irrationally confident, but that's how they got to the top.

  John Eliot

  Inspirational, Running, Self Confidence

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• I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.

  Yo-Yo Ma

  Thinking, Purpose, Pieces

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. January 7, 2013.

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• The most evocative thing to me is probably when a writer and a group of performers can collectively put together something compelling that asks the really simple question: 'How do we live?'

  John Malkovich

  Simple, Together, Groups

  "Malkovich: I don't always play the bad guy". Interview with Rosie Tomkins, www.cnn.com. January 20, 2010.

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• When you do a really good play, the audience and the performers are looking into the same looking glass, the same microscope. And the specimen they are looking at is human life and that's why I do it, that's why I like it.

  John Malkovich

  Play, Glasses, Human Life

  "Malkovich: I don't always play the bad guy". Interview with Rosie Tomkins, www.cnn.com. January 20, 2010.

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• Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I've never played with a band. I've always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn.

  Steve Martin

  Real, Different Experiences, Band

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• The kind of commitment I find among the best performers across virtually every field is a single-minded passion for what they do, an unwavering desire for excellence in the way they think and the way they work. Genuine confidence is what launches you out of bed in the morning, and through your day with a spring in your step.

  James C. Collins

  Morning, Spring, Work

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• I'm a performer, comedian, entertainer, writer and director.

  William Shatner

  Comedian, Directors, Entertainers

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• By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live.

  Sarah Silverman

  Night, Comedy, Saturday

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• It's physically very, very, very trying to be onstage as a performer, not unlike an athlete, for thirty years.

  Nikki Sixx

  Athlete, Years, Trying

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• I know I'm a strong performer. I'm not an evolved musician.

  Patti Smith

  Strong, Musician, Knows

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• It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.

  Kevin Spacey

  Athlete, Character, Night

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• I always stayed fit because I'm a performer, and all of those things help me to perform.

  Sting

  Helping, Fit, Help Me

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• It always gave me the creeps when I saw performers who desperately wanted the audience to like them. That's not what I'm about.

  Barbra Streisand

  Saws, Creeps, Wanted

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• I made the decision to take on board the critical feedback. Reviews are something you can easily ignore as a performer or writer but I chose to not ignore them here and I think that I benefited. I think I'm stronger for it - and I have a tougher skin as a result.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Thinking, Decision, Skins

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• George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

  Tom Waits

  Vaudeville

  "Tom Waits Interviews Tom Waits". www.npr.org. May 20, 2008.

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• I was never a child actor. I was a child performer.

  Christopher Walken

  Children, Actors, Child Actors

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. October 27, 2004.

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• If any performer has quality in his voice he can almost always be helped to develop all the other necessary attributes.

  Lawrence Welk

  Voice, Quality, Attributes

  Lawrence Welk, Bernice McGeehan (1971). “Wunnerful, Wunnerful: The Autobiography of Lawrence Welk”, Prentice Hall Direct

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• I'm not a natural born performer.

  Amy Winehouse

  Natural, Born

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• A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

  Romola Garai

  Passion, Character, Ideas

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• The worst thing you can do as a performer is to judge your character in any way, positively or negatively.

  Romola Garai

  Character, Judging, Way

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• One's concentration as a performer must remain centered on the action of which one is a part. For it is in truth only one's own concentration on the imagined reality of the role that can force the audience's attention to that same place.

  Rick Dees

  Dance, Reality, Roles

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• ...one cannot but wonder how an environment can make people despair and sit idle and then, by changing the conditions, one can transform the same people into matchless performers.

  Muhammad Yunus

  People, Despair, Wonder

  Muhammad Yunus (2007). “Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty”, p.171, PublicAffairs

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• The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Tired, Half, World

  Jeffrey Eugenides (1993). “The Virgin Suicides: A Novel”, p.161, Macmillan

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• Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

  Lincoln Kirstein

  Dance, Determination, Artist

  Lincoln Kirstein (1970). “Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.

  Nick Cave

  Artist, Thinking, Essentials

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