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Performances Quotes

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Performances Quotes

“In this fight I want to show people who are in poverty, downtrodden or denied that you can succeed. I want my performance to be an inspiration to people. You have to stay in the moment and keep moving ahead. I just want to show everyone that you can find answers to your problems and afflictions with hard work and perseverance.”

“Maybe at the core of me, I'm a survivor, but I don't do it on purpose. Sometimes, in acting of course with your performance, some of your own personal character seeps through. My performance goal has always been to perform for the audience. People pay their hard earned money, and so I always desire to give all of myself in every single scene.”

“All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don' t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”

“The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny-uncultured-yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy.”

“I like the adrenaline of live performance, whatever that is, appearing in front of an audience of any kind, whether it's one or a hundred or a thousand. It gives you a buzz of adrenaline, its exciting. The thing about that is that you want to make those nerves work for you in terms of an energy that's appropriate for the part and the performance, and not to distract the people who are watching so that they become nervous for you.”

“The Pink Panther wasn't shown to the press for reasons that soon became apparent when I saw it at a public performance. Two people (20 per cent of the audience) laughed; one was Chinese, the other, whom I couldn't see, might have been an escaped hyena. This laughless francophobic comedy stars its co-scriptwriter, Steve Martin, in what is, by my reckoning, his eighth lousy remake since 1989.”

“A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.”

“I'm criticizing the way they are perceived. I was going through a book of Marina Abramovic and Ulay's 1970s performance work the other day. These people did two, even three Documentas or Venice Biennales over the course of a decade without any fuss. They would just treat it as any of their other engagements, with the same level of dignity and commitment they'd reserve for a one-day event in a small gallery on the Austrian mountains.”

“There were radio shows where you actually got to hear people play off of each other and get that immediate magic that goes on. And rather than doing what a lot of shows do, where an individual comes in, reads their part, and you edit it together later on and try to build a performance, we're lucky because this is really very much a theatrical performance that is going on, every single week.”

“The cash register did more for human morality than the Congregational Church. It was a really powerful phenomenon to make an economic system work better, just as, in reverse, a system that can be easily defrauded ruins a civilization. A system that's very hard to defraud, like a cash register, helped the economic performance of a civilization by reducing vice, but very few people within economics talk about it in those terms.”

“There are some movies that deserve criticism. They want people to know that it's a great dramatic accomplishment and has some great performances in it. But, c'mon. Yes, you will have some fun if you go see 'Snakes on a Plane.' Snakes are biting people - and they're biting them right on screen. There's nothing to review. It's not 'Snakes on the Waterfront.' You don't have snakes going, 'I coulda been a constrictor.' No. Hell no. It's 'Snakes on a Plane.'”

“I think you've got to take the risks. There's no point playing it safe, because either you'll get bored or the audiences will get bored. Sometimes, you're going to make mistakes, and that's fine, but you have to take the risks. I think Pirates is one of the prime examples of that with Johnny Depp's performance, and part of the reason that people love it so much is that you watch it and go, "Gutsy, really gutsy!"”

“I don't care what the press is about a person that I'm working with. I care about how they come to work every day. I don't care who broke up with who or who is sleeping with who or who went out where. I don't care what you do with your personal life. It's when people take their personal lives into a space where it affects their performance at work, that's when I would stop taking someone seriously.”

“I think directors can be a little insensitive to how vulnerable an actor is, when he's giving a performance. Part of the job of an actor is to invite scrutiny, but with that, the people around them have to nurture that and put them in an environment where they feel safe and they feel like they can risk something.”

“I'm really excited that people are receiving my performance like this. It makes me feel good, because I've been working really hard. And this character [Idi Amin], I worked particularly hard on. But I don't want to get too caught up in it, because first of all, it could lead to a great disappointment. You never know what's going to happen.”

“If a legislator is safe from competition, or if he represents groups with the same economic and political beliefs, he does not have to change his ideas or respond to the needs of the broader population. He can rest content with a mediocre, absentee performance knowing he will be returned to office. And as he is returned year after year the seniority system gives him immense control over people from other parts of the country whose views he need not heed at all.”

“around 1977 I became very ... negative, I began to do things unconsciously that I didn't understand, and they were very sabotagistic and I didn't know what I was doing. I was pissing everybody off, I was breaking my bridges. I was hostile to people, I was doing performances and insulting people there - I was doing whatever I could to destroy whatever world I had created ten years before, without knowing, really, why”

“I'm popular in the United States and I'm popular in England. England is just more concentrated. The people are closer together. Venues are closer together. Many albums of mine have been popular in England, but, no hit singles. All the hit singles I had were before I went to England. So, I'm not necessarily more popular in England, I'm just popular in England, and more so for my performances than hit records. But, I enjoy doing concert halls all over America, England, Scotland and Australia.”

“The nice thing about live performance is that I've never, ever been let down. Partly I'm lucky that my audience self-selects itself. Generally they know what they're in for, and generally we all just like each other and get along. But I always find one or two or a dozen really interesting people in the audience who make the show different. And that's one of the things I really like about performing.”