Quotes About Performers

#1. If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.

Peter Maxwell Davies

#2. An actor stands in front of a camera onstage, and he controls time and space for the audience. He tells them how long this will take, where to look, when to look, what to think about it. And good performers should be able to do their part with the sound off.

John Michael Higgins

#3. I didn't start to work until I realized what it was I had to offer. I stopped imitating performers I admired and started just being myself.

Rob McClure

#4. In the scientific community you find competent teachers and original researchers, just as in the musical community you find many good performers but very few good composers.

Mario Bunge

#5. Most people don't understand performers are really sheltered and protected so much sometimes that they don't get a chance to live their lives.

Diana Ross

#6. The happiest people I know are the ones that are still working. The saddest are the ones who are retired. Very few performers retire on their own. It's usually because no one wants them. Six years ago Sinatra announced his retirement. He's still working.

George Burns

#7. So often, I have seen really, really talented performers never quite relating to material. I mean, there's a lot of gay actors, for example, that are obviously gay. They're not going to be able to do some of the material. Some of them they can, some of them they can't.

Julie Halston

#8. I came back to New York after college like any number of struggling performers, and you just find that niche where you can have some sort of impact. And for me that turned out to be comedy.

Billy Eichner

#9. There are certain performers that the gay community receives and recognizes with love, and my whole life, I've always responded to those same artists,

Annaleigh Ashford

#10. The best shows have a clear idea of what they want to achieve, where the performers have the ability to disrupt normality and engage directly with audiences of all ages. A company who can do just that (apparently effortlessly) is dotComedy.

Lyn Gardner

#11. City needs creativity to retain the high performers who have lived there for years as well as to attract new, interesting residents.

Charles Landry

#12. The professionalism of technique and flash of dexterity are more comfortable to be around than raw creative power, hence our society generally rewards virtuoso performers more highly than it rewards original creators.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

#13. When I got lucky with Dean, I ended up with 16 years with one of the truly great performers of all time. He was the greatest performer I'd ever been around, bar none.

Greg Garrison

#14. If the Apostle justly prohibits the use of unknown tongues in the church, much less would he have tolerated these artificial musical performances, which are addressed to the ear only, and seldom strike the understanding, even of the performers themselves.

Theodore Beza

#15. Today, I marvel at the vegan foods in the supermarket, at the cruelty-free clothing choices in stores, and at the fantastic alternatives to dissection in schools, the modern ways to test medicines without killing rabbits and beagles, the many forms of entertainment involving purely human performers.

Ingrid Newkirk

#16. I think that standup has always been an acquired taste and there was always only a handful of performers that were really inspired.

Marc Maron

#17. While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

David Antin

#18. The fact is, the difference between peak performers and everybody else are much smaller than everybody else thinks.

Charles Garfield

#19. Performers had to be transparent. Diva behavior was rendered difficult or impractical - the physical situation would have made it look silly. The performers were obliged to interact and mingle with their audience.

David Byrne

#20. It's personalities, it's conflict, it's all of these things that actually make performers interesting.

Simon Cowell

#21. We have all, at one time or another, been performers, and many of us still are - politicians, playboys, cardinals and kings.

Laurence Olivier

#22. Conductors are performers.

Michael Tilson Thomas

#23. When I look at great singers like Sinatra, Bennett and (Tom) Jones, I see great performers that can really move an audience. I really consider myself a troubadour privately and a song-plugger publicly.

Tiny Tim

#24. I have been trying to find out exactly when listeners and performers decided that applause between movements would not be allowed, but nobody seems to have been willing to admit that they were the culprit.

Emanuel Ax

#25. It's really a grand old, legendary theatre where the spirits of like Judy Garland and all these great performers have been. The clubs are way more underground.

Deborah Cox

#26. After university, I was working as a stylist in the Paris theatres when I had a flash of inspiration. I made necklaces from the bikinis designed for the cabaret performers of Folies Bergeres. I was so happy with them that it was only then that I sought out formal training in jewelry.

Paloma Picasso

#27. All the great performers I have worked with are fueled by a personal dream.

John Eliot

#28. A lot of guys get slammed pretty hard. I do think there's a tendency with women performers to just sort of write them off. The "Flavor of the Month" kind of thing. Or as a novelty, because I do think women in bands are still considered a novelty, or a little confection.

Nina Gordon

#29. The reason I'm in this business, I assume all performers are
it's Look at me, Ma! It's acceptance, you know
Look at me, Ma, look at me, Ma, look at me, Ma. And if your mother watches, you'll show off till you're exhausted; but if your mother goes, Ptshew!

Lenny Bruce

#30. There's a lot that goes into training, singers to eventually become performers. There's, projection, uh, which in many cases the artist was never concerned about.

Cholly Atkins

#31. One major study observed that in recent years, we have done a magnificent job of turning out fabulously trained performers with no place to play. More encouraging news is that employment options and a real strategy for developing the arts are becoming part of many conservatory curricula.

Renee Fleming

#32. Be intensely result-oriented in everything you do. This is a key characteristic of high performers.

Brian Tracy

#33. We aren't people who believe that just because we're performers our opinions on everything need to be known.

Penn Jillette

#34. The words we use have weight. Whether it's in a conversation with a friend or something said publicly on stage or broadcast. And as performers, we know that because that's why we choose the words we use - that's the whole point of comedy.

Hari Kondabolu

#35. There are plenty of actors who've caught the singing bug and vice versa, but with musical performers, you're constantly a persona - which is something I love about acting: you play a character, you leave and you get to be yourself again.

Freddie Stroma

#36. There are few performers who would have had the audacity to even bring up the fact that they had been poorly reviewed.

Sandra Bernhard

#37. Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect.

David McCullough

#38. If you stay half-alert, you can pick the spectacular performers right from your place of business or out of the neighborhood shopping mall, and long before Wall Street discovers them.

Thomas Rowe Price Jr.

#39. Veteran performers are dying off, and new acts simply aren't emerging on the national scene.

Brian Setzer

#40. It is possible to become world-class, enter the top 5% of performers in the world, in almost any subject within 6-12 months, or even 6-12 weeks.

Timothy Ferriss

#41. I discovered early on that some performers live their life in order to act, so all their relationships are simply an experience that they can feed back into their work. Which I find vampiric.

Cate Blanchett

#42. It's given many great performers their start, but more importantly, it's killed thousands of barely talented people and it's put them to death, and they're now doing the jobs they're built for.

Bill Murray

#43. My son has been known to throw a book at the television set when he called for me to come play and I was obviously busy in the box. But I'm told that children of television performers grow up thinking that all mommies or daddies work on TV and that it's no big deal.

Jane Pauley

#44. Canada has given us John Candy and Martin Short and Bill Shatner and Lord knows how many other wonderful performers.

Jamie Farr

#45. I think so much of what informs us as performers is what we had to endure as kids growing up. I was the youngest in my family. I always got a lot of attention.

Sandra Bernhard

#46. Serving and helping are great things, but we can go too far. Managers should not adopt poor performers. Colleagues should not cover for each other's mistakes. Parents should not enable their children.

John G. Miller

#47. Before I was an actor I was a break dancer, one of those street performers you see. I guess my introduction into the professional world of performing was a stint as back up dancer for Lionel Richie and I performed at the closing ceremony at the '84 Olympics.

Cuba Gooding Jr.

#48. Even world class performers can benefit from walk breaks.

Jeff Galloway

#49. You have to remember we're just performers, that we seldom have any kind of grasp on real life.

Tom Kenny

#50. My sympathies go out to the young performers today because they are under a microscope in a way I wasn't. Now everybody's got a camera phone and can record at will or take pictures of you. It's just a different world. I don't know how I would have fared back then.

Ricky Schroder

#51. It was at a performance art space that's no longer around, Gusto House ... All of these great performers from all over the country lived on the Lower East Side, and they would take somebody's living room that opened right onto the street, open the door and charge tickets and put up chairs.

John Leguizamo

#52. Honestly, I just love great performers and people who love what they do.

Zendaya

#53. I think Phil Collins is one of the most underrated musicians, singers, performers - he is absolutely amazing, I think, and I think he's probably got a bit of a rough ride occasionally because he became so mainstream and so popular.

Rick Astley

#54. I read that young Netalia Lackless had run away with a troupe of traveling performers.

Patrick Rothfuss

#55. Strive hard to be among the top performers. To do this, create a standard. Go higher than this standard. Set another higher standard; surpass it and repeat the process.

Israelmore Ayivor

#56. I'm usually put off by performers when they get political.

Tracey Ullman

#57. The top players in every field think differently when all the marbles are on the line. Great performers focus on what they are doing, and nothing else ... They let it happen, let it go. They couldn't care less about the results.

John Eliot

#58. By the 1970s, pornography had caught up with The Block, where performers were totally in the nude. I wasn't going to do that, and I certainly wasn't about to let my girls do it. After all, I'm religious, and if my mother knew I was performing in the nude, she would have had a heart attack.

Blaze Starr

#59. She bought raffle tickets for charity, gave money to street performers, and was always sponsoring annoying friends who were running yet another marathon for some worthy cause (even though the true cause was their own fitness).

Liane Moriarty

#60. People want performers, personality and drama, and you got that in the .

Kim Wilde

#61. 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

#62. My folks were country music performers. They made records and even did a few tours with the Grand Ole Opry. There always were a lot of guitarists around.

Lenny Breau

#63. Part of the Hong Kong style is the fact that a lot of the performers can perform the moves, and we don't over-rehearse this stuff.

Daniel Wu

#64. A lot of performers don't want to leave the circuit, the European opera house circuit, partly because most singers don't sing many concerts, or at least not while they are in their prime.

Renee Fleming

#65. I guess some people want to be performers because they want to be famous.

Jenny Slate

#66. Peak performers see the ability to manage change as a necessity in fulfilling thier missions.

Charles Garfield

#67. Show business imposes its own strict temporality: no matter how many CDs or DVDs we own, it would still have been better to have been there, to have seen the living performers in the richness of their being and to have participated, however briefly, in the glory of their performance.

Larry McMurtry

#68. So few people who do porn for so many years make it when matriculating back into the real world. The recidivism rate for porn performers rivals that among career criminals for the same basic reason. It's all they know.

Tyler Knight

#69. I've discovered that numerous peak performers use the skill of mental rehearsal of visualization. They mentally run through important events before they happen.

Charles Garfield

#70. Ads are not written to entertain. When they do, those entertainment seekers rare little likely to be the people whom you want. This is one of the greatest advertising faults. Ad writers abandon their part. They forgot they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause

Claude C. Hopkins

#71. I love performing in a good straight play as well and I'm a crossover actor, I crossover from plays to musicals, musicals to plays. This is very difficult for performers.

Erica Schroeder

#72. There are some strong female performers out there. But the industry's pre-occupation with the packaging of how a woman looks has gone completely the other way, back to almost the 60s, early 70s.

Siouxsie Sioux

#73. Radio continues to be the very best advertising music performers have. No one who ever grabbed a Grammy got there without radio.

Gordon Smith

#74. Songwriters aren't always performers, and even performing songwriters aren't always the kind of show-biz performers you think they'd be.

Lyle Lovett

#75. I don't like when performers rag on their ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend in absentia. If they're not there, it just feels rude ... I'm never going to say anything personal about myself on stage. That's my new goal.

David Rees

#76. There are performers who have built their whole career doing magic on TV and can't really perform live at all - don't really have jobs and skills.

Penn Jillette

#77. The proliferation of new music groups and individual performers focusing on new music today is heartening. On the one hand the culture is very resistant to new things, and yet it continues to change and grow.

Michael Hersch

#78. What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?

Lewis Mumford

#79. I've been with certain stars; some are caring and pay attention to their fans and to their fellow performers and some are too busy. Elvis never seemed too busy.

Minnie Pearl

#80. Nowadays, performers worry too much about how they look. They're not concerned about what they're really saying to their audience.

Gloria Trevi

#81. The people who were learning from me tended to be more commercial performers who were gonna rip off the salient idea to do it in a way that will sell, but they weren't going for the music.

Iggy Pop

#82. Black slaves seem to have cost from two to three hundred dirhams; black eunuchs, at least two or three times as much. Female black slaves were sold at five hundred dirhams or so; trained singing girls or other performers, at ten or even twenty thousand.

Bernard Lewis

#83. When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.

Edward R. Murrow

#84. They've pursued their own agendas, and they've done what they've wanted to do and not pursued traditional careers in the music industry. They've followed their own instincts, and they are in many ways maverick performers.

Neil Tennant

#85. Top performers take action now, they move, they execute.

Tony Jeary

#86. What would people think of a tradesman, that was to give a ball in his shop, hire performers, and hand refreshments about, with a view to benefit his business?

Jean-Baptiste Say

#87. When you have performers, there's the uniqueness of live performance and what performers do in concerts.

Paul Lansky

#88. These performers that go on about their technique and craft - oh, puleeze! How boring! I don't know what 'technique' means. But I do know what experience is.

Elaine Stritch

#89. If you read reviews of concerts, the word 'creative' comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren't creative. Critics might say they are, but they're just playing another persons work. They didn't create it.

Ned Rorem

#90. If you could trade the bottom 10 percent of your team for new hires, would your organization improve? If so, then you need to look at the hiring process that yielded those low performers and see how you can improve it.

Eric Schmidt

#91. It always gave me the creeps when I saw performers who desperately wanted the audience to like them. That's not what I'm about.

Barbra Streisand

#92. I think for many songwriter/performers, you need to go off by yourself and write the songs to begin with, but then you need people to bring them to life. So you have to be comfortable with solitude and also with being very social.

Alan Licht

#93. Film is a collaborative art form. I don't know why you wouldn't recognize the stunt performers.

David Leitch

#94. Performers are so vulnerable. They're frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it's warm, where it's OK to fail - a kind of home, I suppose.

Jane Campion

#95. There are a lot of bands and performers whose careers are permanently derailed by spectacularly bad management.

Amanda Marshall

#96. I feel like it's important, especially at young age, to find exactly what it is that makes your style so important as opposed to just trying to fit into the iconic styles of performers out there.

Jennifer Damiano

#97. My family aren't performers. They're just normal people. They don't understand this entertainment world. They just think it's mental. They have no idea what I'm doing in America.

Jay Ryan

#98. I was very young at the time, and I mainly appreciated their vocal qualities, even though I was already living as they did - as black performers in a white world.

Bobby Short

#99. The stage is close to being in the middle of the hall, so that the performers are surrounded by the listeners. I feel that we are all experiencing the music together.

Emanuel Ax

#100. Don't settle for poor performers. Keep in mind that one great person will always out-produce and out-perform two mediocre people.

John C. Maxwell