Performer Quotes

“Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“To perform you need practice, to practice you need passion.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.”
― David Byrne, How Music Works

“Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“This is the world of pretend. We are artists and we are servants of the stage, and I take both jobs very seriously. As artists, we work as a collective—all for one and one for all. As servants, we work for thos who venture out alone, otherwise known as performers.”
― Rebecca Stead, Goodbye Stranger

“I'm like a circus standing on two legs.”
― Nuno Roque

“I don't think any responsible performer would go on stage high. If he convinced himself he is better that way, he is deluding himself.”
― Oliver

“A crowd of men stood in front of them. Of all ages, with expressions of sex-wonder in their eyes, gazing curiously as men who cannot solve a mystery that populates graveyards and through the ages has sent poets, popes, kings and fools to the junk heap.”
― Jim Tully, Circus Parade

“The upper management team had informed me that an employee that worked for me was a poor performer and would be terminated soon. This employee was clearly displaying mental health issues that were causing problems in the workplace. When I followed the company procedures and reported this to human resources, their response was to inform me that my contract would not be renewed and I would be immediately fired if anyone complained about me. This was my introduction to how mental health issues are handled in the USA.”
― Steven Magee

“It is easier to be a mere performer and not to make serious decisions, to live with an assistance of someone else’s mind and obey someone else’s command when you are a person of victim mentality”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Great acting is as much about the choices a performer makes as it is about their ability.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Johnny Rotten slouches at the front of the stage, propped up on the mike stand. He's leaning so far forward he looks as if he might topple into the empty space in front of the audience. · His face is pale and his body is twisted into such an awkward ugly shape he looks deformed. He looks ordinary, about the same age as us, the kind of boy I was at comprehensive school with. He's not a flashy star like Marc Bolan or David Bowie, all dressed up in exotic costumes, he's not a virtuoso musician like Eric Clapton or Peter Green, he's not even a macho rock-and-roll pub-band singer – he's just a bloke from Finsbury Park, London, England, who’s pissed off. Johnny sneers at us in his ordinary North London accent, his voice isn't trained and tuneful, it's a whiny cynical drawl, every song delivered unemotionally. There's no fake American twang either. All the things I'm so embarrassed about, John's made into virtues. He's unapologetic about who he is and where he comes from. Proud of it even. He's not taking the world's lack of interest as confirmation that he’s wrong or worthless. I look up at him twisting and yowling and realise it's everyone else who's wrong, not him. How did he make that mental leap from musically untrained, state-school-educated, council estate boy, to standing on stage in front of a band? I think he's brave. A revolutionary. He's sending a very powerful message, the most powerful message anyone can ever transmit. Be yourself.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“I like performing because it's direct contact with live people. I write a good deal of the time but that's introspective creation rather than interaction.”
― Oliver

“O it does fascinate me so, my new-old-new friend, to compare our lives. Of course I am really not an artist or a writer tho' I am a story-teller. I am a born orator and even now I long & long & long for The Platform as an old circus clown longs—or as we pretend he longs for the Ring! On the platform and there alone I am really myself & in my element & now I have been away from the platform for 20 years!”
― John Cowper Powys, Proteus and the Magician: The Letters of Henry Miller and John Cowper Powys

“Who cares if you can nail your performance once. I want you to be able to do it over and over, as you would on set when they move from the master shot to the medium shot to the close up and then do the same thing again in the turnaround. That would be impressive to me.  ”
― Murisa Harba Durrant, Acting With Energy: Creating Brilliance Take After Take

“Music arrives when the Muse comes around.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“For me, any art I create is for my own happiness. If it makes anyone else happy, that is a bonus.”
― Aegelis, Sophizo

“What a lot of failed and mediocre actors do not realize, probably because it is ironic, is that the key to being a great actor, like any great artist, begins with their ability to be themselves, to feel comfortable exposing all of themselves in their art.”
― Jack Freestone