If you had of told me age 10 that in 19 years time I would be on a stage in Salford performing with Les Dennis in a sitcom I had written, I would have believed you.
Every sketch goes through a rewrite stage where a group of writers sits around a table and pitches more jokes and ideas for the piece.
If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room, you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything.
Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.
You can't act being a boxer. It's like being on stage.
Growing up on stage, I was introduced to makeup at a young age and I will never forget the first time I tried on a L'Oreal Paris iconic lipstick - it was instant glamour and I've been hooked ever since.
Whenever I sing 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' the way people sing along with me still excites me. It's one of the songs that audiences know all the lyrics to, and they sing along with me, and it makes me so happy. People also know my songs 'Holding out for a Hero' and 'Lost in France,' and this gives me so much joy on stage.
You put as much effort as you can when they're young into trying to teach them to be good people or make them the best they can be, and they're older now, my kids. I'm at that stage where I let them go, and you just hope that all that nurturing you did earlier on sticks, and you launched good people out there.
I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.
It was great about the sizes of the audiences we were getting in America, but sometimes you feel like telling some of the men that you're not on stage to have your body looked at.
Pope John Paul II was a great presence on the stage. Pope Benedict is a much more gentle and refined person, and I think he benefits greatly from the television close-ups because he wants to engage in a dialogue, in conversation. He wants to put forward his views in a measured, eloquent, rational way.
From the stage I've seen people of all ages absolutely roaring at really good toilet humour.
The excitement of stepping onto a stage - there's nothing quite like it.
I can't imagine doing anything cooler or better than what we did on 'The Stage' and felt like we're firing on all cylinders.
When I get on stage, I try to win my pay: to please and that people leave satisfied... being seductive has given me good results.
I guess, for me, the therapy is walking on stage, playing all of our songs, and walking out. That's probably my therapy. That's a good time.
I think if a 30-year-old Bill Cosby sat on stage with a 72-year-old Bill Cosby, they would enjoy each other.
I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.
I guess I've been extremely keen on theatre, on getting on to the stage, taking on different roles, enacting vocations, personalities, people, situations, and I guess that's the interest that has driven me to work in movies.
As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.'
To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.
'Original Sin' is, for me, a murder mystery with a huge cast that plays out on a grand stage.
You've got to remember even the Apple regeneration started with colorful iMacs. So let us first get the colorful iMacs. I think with what we're doing with Lumia, we're at that stage. I want to do good devices that people like, and then we will go on to doing the next thing and the next thing.
The me you see on stage is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most annoying, my most petty, and my most patronizing.
The decision to retire was quite an easy one for me because by that stage my knees were so badly gone. If I had been like Martina Navratilova and my body had let me I would have carried on playing a lot longer.
It could fairly be said that America, during the Bush years, has entered an Age of Denial - arguably the first stage of a nation's decline.
I did a live late-night talk show called 'Creation Nation' with friends of mine. I had a sidekick and a band, and I wrote the whole thing. And it had the form of a late-night talk show, but we did it on stage because no one was giving me a TV show at the time.
When I started writing the music, I wanted everything to be consistent from the way I dressed to the way I presented myself online. I wanted everything to match what I was doing on stage.
The study of history reveals that human progress has not been continuous and regular, but intermittent and spasmodic, often depending upon apparently accidental causes. It is difficult to get a cross-section view of society at any given stage.
It's the worst feeling in the world - losing, and losing in a final on the big stage is even worse.
Although I don't gamble in life - I've never played poker - I do gamble on stage. I gamble with myself: 'Can I do this?'
It's a very unnatural environment to be in, up on a stage. So you put up defenses to hide. Like looking at the ground with your hair in your eyes, or being tightly wound and quite aggressive and uncooperative, as I used to do.
If you play a part that's been done before, on stage for instance, you feel like you're carrying a torch and staggering under the weight of it for a bit and then passing it on to somebody else.
You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh.
My first acting experience was a non-speaking role as a robot. My costume was a cardboard box covered in tinfoil, but I was so shy I refused to go on stage.
Seems like everybody has seen 'Cooley High.' That's what put me on the map. Garrett Morris and I go way back, even before the movie. Great guy. We've done theater and stage plays together, Lincoln Center and all kinds of things.
