Performance Quotes

I don't plan in terms of career ambitions. The only career ambition I have is to work with people who are going to bring you up and elevate your performance. They'll let you know things that you didn't know already and bring you places that you might not have gotten to otherwise.

I don't rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room.

Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.

A couple years ago I was going to back off and actually thought about retiring, but it keeps calling me back, and I'm going to keep going back as long as it calls me. I really think it has something to do with the good vibes that I feel I've spread through my performance and through the time that I've spent with fans.

If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.

I started off in a small theatre performance company and worked my way into commercials.

That's how you get a performance - they put trust in you.

Being an athlete, you know how to train and prepare your body for a performance and you're able to do it under pressure.

It was more freeing, mainly because he's so free anyway. He just is in his performance. So to mimic someone doing a free performance, well, that's pretty freeing within itself.

When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.

Music is a performance and needs the audience.

I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.

One only has to look at the performance of the economy to understand how it shapes the perspective of America's youth about military service.

I say this quite deliberately, this is the finest Shakespearean performance I've seen.

But now in this day and age, people are more prone to go out to try new things to enhance their performance on the field - to enhance their physical appearance.

For me, making the show work was getting belly laughs - like most variety artists. But the straight actor believes you fix your performance in rehearsal and that's it.

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.

There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.

Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

Good directing is about getting the performance to be just what's right for the movie.

Performance art can be produced in a coffee house setting.

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.

In 1949 there was a new thing called Television, to which my agency and advisers opposed as a performance medium.

The most memorable performance was my appearance in concert in Carnegie Hall. The first standup to do so.

You can lose in cinema too if you don't put on a good performance.

Performance is your reality. Forget everything else.

Then certainly for a musician timing becomes something that is immediately accessible as a concept, because it's a necessity in ones everyday performance.

I imagined that it might be awkward to talk to your wife about her performance, so going into it I was a little nervous. But doing it was actually a wonderfully inspiring experience.

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.