Performers Quotes - Page 8

• My folks were country music performers. They made records and even did a few tours with the Grand Ole Opry. There always were a lot of guitarists around.

  Lenny Breau

  Music, Country, Records

  4 Copy quote

• Few things turn-off an audience more than a performer with an air of self-imporance or a 'message.'

  Jay Sankey

  Air, Self, Messages

  6 Copy quote

• I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer.

  Mick Ronson

  6 Copy quote

• I wasn't really a performer by temperament.

  Tom Lehrer

  Temperament

  4 Copy quote

• A performer may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases we have a sense in which the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be performer and observer of the same show. Presumably he introcepts or incorporates the standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others so that even in their absence his conscience requires him to act in a socially proper way.

  Erving Goffman

  Taken, Reality, May

  125 Copy quote

• Typical pay increases are not enough to motivate employees, but they are enough to irritate them. … Even when companies create seemingly significant pay differentiation between low and high performers, the actual cash increase is insufficient to sustain performance – or it drives the wrong behaviors. … Effective management is a system, not a pay plan. The mistake is that companies try to solve all their problems with pay.

  Jeffrey Pfeffer

  Mistake, Trying, Typical

  4 Copy quote

• Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain.

  Frank Zappa

  Religious, Writing, Law

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.276, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

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• I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn't saying anything.

  Boz Scaggs

  Artist, Retrospect, Strings

  4 Copy quote

• The more accountable I can make you, the easier it is for you to show youre a great performer.

  Mark V. Hurd

  Easier, Shows, I Can

  4 Copy quote

• I was in New York, miserable because I was working supper clubs but I wasn't expressing myself. I was really unhappy with my life. I saw Max Roach again and he told me I didn't have to do things like that. He made me an honest woman on the stage. I have been performing in that tradition since. I feel that I'm a serious performer now whereas then I wanted to be but I didn't know how.

  Abbey Lincoln

  Music, New York, Unhappy

  6 Copy quote

• I am a writer - that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

  Brian McKnight

  Morning, Sleep, Night

  4 Copy quote

• Strength of will - is essential to your survival and success. The competitor who won't go away, who won't stay down, has one of the most formidable competitive advantages of all. In evaluating people, I prize ego. It often translates into a fierce desire to do their best and an inner confidence that stands them in good stead when things really get rough. Psychologists suggest that there is a strong link between ego and competitiveness. All the great performers I've ever coached had ego to spare.

  Bill Walsh

  Strong, People, Ego

  84 Copy quote

• I must say Ive always composed music from the point of view of the performers.

  Walter Piston

  Views, Point Of View

  5 Copy quote

• I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.

  Andy Goldsworthy

  People, Needs, Sculpture

  7 Copy quote

• The best performers in Europe are those who use their welfare states to help people adjust to change.

  John Monks

  Europe, People, Use

  9 Copy quote

• If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist-then you may please even God.

  Ali Akbar Khan

  Artist, Years, Practice

  35 Copy quote

• The mind of the performer is a very strange thing.

  James Galway

  Mind, Strange, Strange Things

  4 Copy quote

• I have been trying to find out exactly when listeners and performers decided that applause between movements would not be allowed, but nobody seems to have been willing to admit that they were the culprit.

  Emanuel Ax

  Trying, Movement, Applause

  32 Copy quote

• Most performers don't admit this, because it sounds negative and performers are not supposed to be negative, but when I was on the road, I was lonely.

  Tom Glazer

  Lonely, Sound, Negative

  7 Copy quote

• I've been, I think, able to stay grounded in such a crazy business, and I attribute that a lot to my family, and especially to my mother. Because, you know, she just was always there to kind of remind me of what priorities should be. O.K., yes, I'm an artist, I'm a performer, but I'm a sister, I'm a daughter, I'm a granddaughter, I'm an aunt. Those things have to be as important, if not more important, than my career.

  Debbie Gibson

  Daughter, Mother, Crazy

  19 Copy quote

• I have discovered that I cannot enhance anybody's performance without getting them not only to live with the butterflies that come with high-pressure jobs but to embrace that kind of physical response, enjoy it, get into it. That's the first real ticket to being a performer who thinks exceptionally.

  John Eliot

  Jobs, Real, Butterfly

  7 Copy quote

• Performance shots are a waste of time, they look like everyone else's. If you want to shoot a performer, then grab them, own them, you have to own people, then twist them into what you want to say about them.

  Art Kane

  People, Want, Waste

  8 Copy quote

• Show business is one of the few businesses that the devil will actually agree to own just a portion of your soul because he knows if you have a performer's ego you were probably working for him all along.

  Marc Maron

  Mind Your Own Business, Ego, Soul

  4 Copy quote

• You can't ask a guy like me why [I performed]. I really wanted to fly through the air. I was a daredevil, a performer. I loved the thrill, the money, the whole macho thing. All those things made me Evel Knievel. Sure, I was scared. You gotta be an ass not to be scared. But I beat the hell out of death.

  Evel Knievel

  Air, Guy, Thrill

  41 Copy quote

• Three of tonights performers are members of the group Return To One, whose album Hopes and Dreams I heard for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Blown away by the album, I called Nathan Hubbard, the drummer and composer for the group, and with whom I've played on a couple of Trummerflora-related occasions, and asked him to round up several of his Return To One cohorts for tonight's show. I can't recommend their album highly enough; please pick up a copy.

  Mike Keneally

  Dream, Couple, Albums

  4 Copy quote