Quotes About Onstage

#1. Spare time is like spare change. It's hard to quantify, the definition of that phrase. What do I do when I'm not onstage singing, or sleeping, with or without someone else? I watch movies.

Marilyn Manson

#2. I became a comedian because I didn't want to be bullied anymore. Onstage I was safe.

Margaret Cho

#3. I grew up in a family of actors. I grew up onstage. The choice for me wasn't, 'Do I want to be an actor or not?' I always felt like that's just ingrained in you, the need to perform. The choice was, 'Do you want to do this professionally or not?'

James Badge Dale

#4. I know now that everybody in the arts is forever a beginner. Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Every night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.

Joan Rivers

#5. Onstage I like to play with a an 18-inch speaker, which very few bass players do. I need that fat, underneath sound, which I've always had. It suits me admirably to do it like that, and I can imitate that sound by plugging directly into the board in the studio.

Bill Wyman

#6. I find with television, you have to play personality, whereas onstage, everyone talks about 'the character,' and what you do. It's a very different thing, because stage is much bigger, but on television, for things to come across to the public, I think you have to play a bit of your personality.

John Barrowman

#7. Most dancers I know, especially the talented and successful ones, seem to possess [my dog's] knack for living moment to moment. You see, their idea of time is related to those infinitely short moments when they are onstage being their superselves.

Paul Taylor

#8. I think leather pants are just better than jeans onstage; they give the performance a nice attitude, and they are also shockingly comfortable. Comfort is key.

Jessie Baylin

#9. If you want to get known as a singer you hire five sexy chicks and let them fight over you onstage and for the cameras. That's publicity, man.

Sammy Davis Jr.

#10. As a rapper, you sort of act in music videos and in the persona you adopt onstage. You kinda have to put yourself out there and be courageous even to be a rapper. So, to step into acting was not that difficult a transition to make.

Queen Latifah

#11. I just know that when I go onstage, I give everything I have, not only my feet, not only my legs, not only my body. I try to tell a story. Sometimes I am able to cry because I feel like it. Sometimes I am able to love because I feel like it.

Sylvie Guillem

#12. I do think that stand-up comedy in general heavily favors masculinity and so I like to act a little feminine onstage.

Bo Burnham

#13. I'm too nervous to eat before I go onstage, and I'll usually eat out after the performance or when I get home at midnight.

Jo Brand

#14. I know that people think I'm a party king; but, face it, if I finished the bottle every time I took a drink, I wouldn't be able to do the aerials I do onstage.

David Lee Roth

#15. I've done sexual stuff before - onstage, which is even more emotionally difficult. With a TV crew around, you are stopping and starting; it becomes really technical. It's not erotic at all.

Randy Harrison

#16. I've never been onstage in my life.

Anna Friel

#17. I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus - having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don't see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it's more exploring a different side of your personality.

Kim Gordon

#18. When people asked me, "Do you get high to go onstage?" I could never understand the question. I mean, I'd been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it.

George Carlin

#19. I come from a big, loud family, and I'm the quieter one. Performing is something I have to switch on. I've heard I get real sassy onstage, which I'm not in real life! It's fun to be that person for an hour a night.

Lorde

#20. I mean, you still can't jump offstage and go read a book. But I'm getting better at it. It is something you can manage. You can still give everything you have to the audience onstage, and have something for yourself.

Andrew Bird

#21. If I do a bit on stage, I prepare too much. Those bits are all really, really carefully written, and overwritten, and researched. I really don't feel like I can wing it. So I write it out word for word, and when I'm onstage I'll improvise around it.

Andy Daly

#22. I also sort of find the idea that not only do actors want to please when they're onstage, I find actors really want to please off stage a lot of the time, don't they?

Jeffrey Combs

#23. If I found a cure for a huge disease, while I was hobbling up onstage to accept the Nobel Prize they'd be playing the theme song from 'Three's Company'.

John Ritter

#24. I feel so much at home onstage and so comfortable in my body.

Kim Cattrall

#25. Lesbian humor isn't trying to sell anything, it doesn't have to sell out. Coming out as a lesbian onstage is still a very political act; if it weren't, more women would do it.

Kate Clinton

#26. I've done stand-up since I was 18 years old, and I absolutely love it, but I used to go onstage, and the audience was my peers. Now I go onstage, and I could be their mother.

Judy Gold

#27. I began thinking I would do musical theater because in high school that was really the only sort of curriculum they had as far as getting onstage and doing anything that anybody would see. So that's what I did.

Gretchen Mol

#28. I didn't know how to grab your best material and put it together into a comedy set. I would just choose subjects and do it onstage. That's what I learned. I didn't know how to put a set together.

Felipe Esparza

#29. There were times in my career I went a little further than I wanted because of expectations. Doing certain things onstage when children were in the audience, wearing certain clothes, singing certain lyrics.

Cheryl James

#30. My problem with the traditional acting method was that I never understood what you were supposed to be thinking about when you're onstage.

Tina Fey

#31. It's in my blood to tour. It's in my blood to get on the road. It's in my blood to go onstage.

Pauly Shore

#32. I like touring extensively because I think the more hours you spend onstage, the more you know who you are onstage.

Taylor Swift

#33. The best live recordings capture elements of surprise onstage.

M. Ward

#34. As a child, I loved being onstage. I loved singing, I loved the lights, I loved the adrenaline. I even loved learning lines. I was completely obsessive.

Emma Watson

#35. I should clarify that anyone that goes onstage and makes strangers laugh is insane. So I am insane.

Jim Gaffigan

#36. Michael Buble is seriously my favorite entertainer. Have you ever seen the guy in concert? He's hilarious. Women love him. Guys want to meet him. He has everything that I wish I could do onstage. And I'm guessin' he's a good-lookin' guy - although he's not one of 'People' magazine's sexiest men.

Blake Shelton

#37. I expect if you're a professional public speaker, you probably wouldn't want to go onstage and sing and play drums.

Neil Peart

#38. Children go with whatever makes them feel good - like if that's the color green or orange, they do that with their clothes. As I've grown older, everything reversed. My music, my personality - onstage those things became my colors.

Janelle Monae

#39. Onstage, I don't feel any glory from people clapping in the audience, but when they're pushing me to do something new that feels good.

Jack White

#40. What I love about a play is that it's such an investment because only time can create a lot of what happens onstage.

Laura Linney

#41. I remember when both Gnarls Barkley and Justin [Timberlake] lost for Album of the Year [at the Grammys], and I looked at Justin, and I was like: 'Do you want me to go onstage for you? You know, do you want me to fight?

Kanye West

#42. Considering you are pretty much like this the whole time whether you're onstage, whether you're in the van, whether you're eating, whether you're in the hotel room. So everyone has their moments and you kind of learn to respect people's space when they're not in a good mood.

Barry Privett

#43. The most important thing you can do as a performer is to be yourself, or be an onstage version of yourself. If you're not being true to yourself, and somebody likes that other version of you, you're kind of stuck.

Lyle Lovett

#44. Most of my bits are long stream-of-consciousness- type things, and when I'm doing them onstage, other places to take the theme or idea will hit me, and I just go with it.

Joe Rogan

#45. I think a lot of people think I'm doing kind of a character onstage, but what you're really getting is just me.

Harland Williams

#46. Onstage, you can be anything you want to be. In concert, I might project a different side of myself, but I wouldn't do anything I'd be embarrassed of.

Stephanie Mills

#47. It's funny, I used to do a character that was just a baby - just an adult baby. I would get up onstage and complain about adult stuff, but as a baby. I was in a diaper, and I would require hugs from the audience and reassurance and stuff.

John Gemberling

#48. But I love the hot sweat. I think overheating onstage is invigorating. It's better than being comfortable. I think being comfortable is the death of a show.

Victoria Legrand

#49. I'm my own most merciless critic onstage.

Keith Jarrett

#50. I'm too scared to perform onstage. I'm not very good with big crowds.

Alex Pettyfer

#51. You don't get to know anybody in a movie until after it's over. You work less together in a film than you do onstage.

Al Pacino

#52. I had a very sexual experience onstage once. But I won't go there.

Meredith Brooks

#53. When you look into the eyes of your people out there that came to see you, that's when it's like, 'Yep, this is what it's all about.' This is why we don't sleep, and this is why we write songs and try to be the best. This moment right here onstage.

Luke Bryan

#54. If your record doesn't sell that well, man, who cares? All the satisfaction I need ... comes when I step out onstage and see the people. That's awesome. I love that.

Harry Connick Jr.

#55. I suddenly got used to that feeling of being in control, which I never, ever feel when I'm not onstage - a feeling that you're the master of your own universe.

Seinabo Sey

#56. I loathe the idea of going onstage in a T-shirt and jeans.

Martin Gore

#57. I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas 'Mike & Molly' deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It's not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he's a lot bluer onstage.

Billy Gardell

#58. Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.

Molly Crabapple

#59. Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it.

Elaine Stritch

#60. The only reason we wore sunglasses onstage was because we couldn't stand the sight of the audience.

John Cale

#61. I never aspired to be in a band, but being onstage is a very cool feeling. It's like you're the lord of the room. It's hard to croon and run around doing big scissor kicks while also trying to play, though. I'm still mastering that.

Robert Sheehan

#62. I'm the most mellow person offstage. I think it's just, going onstage lets me get out some frustration that I'm too shy to do in real life. Instead of doing it in private, I'd rather do it in front of 1,000 people who've paid $25 to see me lose my mind.

Zach Galifianakis

#63. I think my one of my strengths in standup is my ability to adlib. I do all my best writing on stage. I can sit down and write jokes, but I'd rather go on stage with a premise or an idea and let the jokes come that way. My creative juices are never flowing any better than when I'm onstage.

Henry Cho

#64. The best performance advice I have ever been given was to "Know where your light is, onstage."

Vaginal Davis

#65. I'm not good enough to be playin' much acoustic guitar onstage. Man, you gotta get so right; I mean, the tones, the feel, the sound. Plus, acoustic blues guitar is just that much harder on the fingers.

Johnny Winter

#66. I love the spontaneity of plays and of being onstage, because that's an energy that you can't really fabricate in movies.

Chloe Grace Moretz

#67. Being onstage is just a feeling that you cannot duplicate anywhere else because the energy that the audience is giving you forces you to give more energy. It's such an output and exchange of energy. You can't do that anywhere else.

Aaron Tveit

#68. Honestly, I never needed a mask to go onstage. It was me who was there, and it was always what I felt, based on what I had learned at home, in my religion, and from society. I clung to that: 'This is me, it has to be me.' And if I had an encounter with someone of the same sex, I looked away.

Ricky Martin

#69. My favorite comedians are basically themselves onstage.

Andy Kindler

#70. If I ever go onstage at the Oscars, you can guarantee I'll be wearing my motorcycle boots.

Dean Winters

#71. I still get really nervous, though, before each performance. It kind of hits about 15 minutes before we go onstage - sometimes I don't even want to go on. But once I'm onstage I'm fine.

Alison Lohman

#72. Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage.

Norman Lock

#73. Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from her anxiety.

Scott Stossel

#74. Well, in the theater, I think you're actually more responsible for what is going on onstage as a director than you are in film.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#75. I was convinced that I was going to be onstage for the rest of my life.

James Callis

#76. I really don't think of myself as a singer. I think of myself as an entertainer, and the best place I do it is onstage.

Cher

#77. Coming from a background of being onstage, you're onstage for two and a half hours and you're in it for the whole time no matter what you're doing. Even if you don't have a line, you have to stay in it.

Aaron Tveit

#78. I'm a big fan of the young 1950s Elvis when he would just go onstage and control the whole environment.

Bruno Mars

#79. 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.

Andy Kindler

#80. I felt like onstage I have to have a certain amount of anonymity, like, personal anonymity, to feel loose and free. When you're up there with people who've known you for a decade, and you make a bad joke and you hear the cackling behind the drums, it's hard to get lost in the moment.

Jenny Lewis

#81. Just the same way I'd say a prayer before going onstage, taking that even further and using the drum to inspire people. And using that as a vehicle for the intention.

Rick Allen

#82. While I have not ruled out the possibility of doing music, what I don't want to do is go onstage and perform old songs. I do, all the time, but I don't think it is artistically brave.

Henry Rollins

#83. You study all your life, you work really hard to do your best work onstage and onscreen, and then you make your best money playing an ant.

Alex Rocco

#84. Back then, people were throwing their underwear onstage. I remember taking eight pairs of my own underwear to the cleaners and getting only four back.

Dennis Quaid

#85. When we're onstage we're not literature, we're sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.

Julian Barnes

#86. In 2004, I went onstage for the first time. They put a mike in my hand and pushed me out the door into the crowd. I did the three songs I had recorded and got out. It was the worst day of my life.

M.I.A.

#87. Being on stage was all about the palpable energy of a rapt audience hopefully buying into a life onstage. The immediate connection with the audience was the best part for me. The camera is not as fun, but your work is preserved forever. There's immortality to it.

David Walton

#88. The stage is my comfort zone, and playing live is what I've always wanted to do. It's why I want to do two hundred dates a year. I wouldn't feel that way if I were nervous onstage.

Hunter Hayes

#89. When I go onstage, I kind of turn into a beast sometimes, this alter-ego, you know.

Nicole Scherzinger

#90. I like that because the fans want to see onstage what they know so well from the big screen.

Frankie Avalon

#91. Queen Latifah used to help me out with my kids, because while we were all out on tour - Public Enemy, Naughty By Nature, Queen Latifah, Heavy D - when Public Enemy went onstage, I didn't have anybody solid to watch my kids. So, Latifah would help me out.

Flavor Flav

#92. Being onstage is everything thats good about life.

Joan Jett

#93. I was basically a dork that hit the books and liked to build things and did all of the things that you weren't supposed to do to be popular. But somehow I ended up onstage, playing guitar in front of everybody else.

Tom Scholz

#94. You're standing onstage in a sold-out arena with people singing your music, and you feel like the loneliest person in the world. Because here's a party that, essentially, it's for you. And you still somehow feel like you don't belong there. Those people all have their lives and go back home.

Trent Reznor

#95. When you're onstage, you're acutely aware of the reaction of a particular group of people, because it's like a wave.

Cate Blanchett

#96. I think that standing onstage on January 19th, and my father had just defied all expectations and won Iowa, was by far the most surreal moment.

Vanessa Kerry

#97. What I like about Elvis is the same thing I like about James Brown, Michael Jackson, Prince. These guys, back in the day, there was no smoke and mirrors. It was just raw talent. They would step out onstage and command an audience. Talk about awesome.

Bruno Mars

#98. You are an athlete when you're onstage. You can't get tired.

Faye Dunaway

#99. I really enjoy theater. Performing live onstage is helping me to grow as an actress.

Kim Fields

#100. It's good to be playing one and a half hour again. In the States we played like an hour and when you got onstage it felt like all of a sudden you are already done your set. But now, it feels like we are touring again.

Kerry King