I'm not trying to be romantic. I think you can tell when people are trying to be sexy onstage. When I was doing 'All the Way,' I was really thinking about my wife. People don't know my personal experience, but they can tell it's an honest interpretation.
I meditate and pray before going onstage - it helps me focus.
I suppose people do sometimes not understand the seeming disparity between my onstage personality and my public personality in the press. But I feel that I am definitely a louder, more outspoken person with those I am close to.
When I get onstage, I automatically feel beautiful.
As soon as my foot is in the light onstage, I am home. It is what I love to do. It is what I have always loved to do.
I've never acted, but I'm an entertainer. So I kind of used what I know from being onstage. I've done a thousand and two interviews, and I've been on camera a million times, so I'm not uncomfortable on camera, but it was interesting for me to be someone else.
When I go onstage, every situation I have to play, I feel pain. When I sing 'Madama Butterfly' I feel completely everything she felt: It's horrible.
I get an idea about something. I just start thinking about it, and then I get onstage and I talk about it, and then I think about it some more and talk about it some more, and think about it some more and talk about it some more, until it starts to take a shape.
Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word - and actually wanting to see you.
I get nervous all the time. The only time I'm not nervous is onstage, which is weird.
When you're onstage and you know you're bombing, that's very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going - you're bombing, but you can't stop.
It's me, it's my habit to perform live onstage every four, five years. In Italy, it's my habit.
The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres.
I don't enjoy writing newspaper articles any more than people like reading them. I'm a standup comic, not a journalist, although sometimes onstage I will say: 'What else is in the news?' Writing is work, which I'm not comfortable with.
The most amazing thing is being onstage and watching the audience sing every song lyric for lyric.
I used to be more involved with every aspect of everything onstage. I'm way more relaxed now. It feels like anything can happen.
If I see a great performance on television, onstage, in the movies, I go to work the next day with a renewed energy and less fear. These great artists take me out of my life and make me want to go there.
Onstage, even though you're here together with the other actor, face-to-face, playing out the scene, you also have that other ear pointed out toward the audience and how they're listening. That informs a lot.
Sometimes I'm more true when I'm up onstage than I'm able to be in my regular life. It's not as exciting to be at home, but I've got to learn how to make that work, and then I will be an ordinary woman.
Two hours onstage... that's the best part because it makes it all worth it.
I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are.
Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?
As a standup performer, I'm onstage, and it's important how the audience is looking at me. I'm looking at whether they're leaning forward or not, those types of things. You read an energy. And it's the same thing in a scene with other actors.
The aesthetic came along the way, I think - just through experimenting, and going on tour, and trying stuff out on stage, having fun with it, and not taking it too seriously. If I had a ballgown at home, I'd wear it onstage. If I found something in a charity shop, I'd wear it. That's where it grew from - just wanting to play dress-up.
I'm not the first one to say it, but that time onstage is a heightened sense of present tense.
I always say, when you're onstage you can't please everybody. I'm sure there are people who may not take to what I do, but that's okay. Thank God the majority are in my corner.
I have really musical parents, and my dad was always encouraging, but the desire to get onstage and perform really did come from me. I'd never push my future children.
Music is very similar to comedy: It's all about texture, timing, context, vocabulary, performance. When someone's onstage doing a solo, essentially it's the same thing as what a comedian does. They're in the moment. They're listening.
I've been singing properly every day since I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I have never had any problems with my voice, ever. I've had a sore throat here and there, had a cold and sung through it, but that day it just went while I was onstage in Paris during a radio show. It was literally like someone had pulled a curtain over it.
I've always been a fan of George C. Scott, who was working in movies when I was in college... films like 'Patton' and 'Hospital.' I was really impressed by him, and I had seen him onstage as well in 'Uncle Vanya.' He was a champ to me.
To me, getting to do music and videos, you work on a character. Being onstage is acting; you get to be larger than life and larger than yourself.
I'm used to being the only black guy. I've seriously walked onstage, looked out in the audience, 15,000 people - and I'm the only one in the place. It's no big deal. My whole career's been like that.
I could never go onstage in denims.
When you're onstage with an electric band going through a massive P.A. system, it's very artificial. You can't really hear your own voice as it comes out of your mouth.
There's the human side of people who are in public life that connects people. Whether it's favorable or unfavorable, it gives them some connection with the person who's onstage, and I think those connections are edifying.
I definitely am a performer, and there are different styles of stand-up; I mean, some people are writers and they get onstage to get jokes out, and that's definitely not what I do. I like to just go up and, if I'm telling a story about someone, I'll play his or her part.