Top 90 Quotes & Sayings by Joel Grey - Page 2

Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.

For a few years, there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: 'Chicago,' 'Wicked' and 'Anything Goes.'

I'm crazy about surprises. I love chance.

I don't look like Brad Pitt.

I thought 'The Humans' was a beautiful play.

I did a benefit one night at Carnegie Hall with Bono and Lady Gaga and Rufus Wainwright.

When I read a script, the important thing is that I can connect in some way with that character and have some idea from what his story is that I can tell that story too, because that's all acting is, is storytelling.

I'm very slow. I'm a slow learner.

I saw Lee J. Cobb in 'Death of a Salesman' when I was about 15, and I couldn't get up from my seat in the theater; I was so... I was weeping, and I was upset. And I find that people are still like that in a similar circumstance in a theater today, where they just can't get up. It's too heartbreaking.

That's what people forget about, is that when things are very, very powerful in a sad way, they have that possibility of also being over-the-top, hysterically funny.

A lot of people have problems thinking of you doing more than one thing. If you do one thing, then you couldn't possibly do another thing well. Of course, we know that's not so.

Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.

My mother named me after her favorite actor, Joel McCrea, and dressed and presented me as her avatar. I'm sure she wanted to be a performer, but when that was impossible, I was her next best shot.

I spent 15 years of not being able to get a job creating a role on Broadway.

I worked with a lot of leading ladies: Bebe Neuwirth, Anne Rankin, Bernadette Peters, Liza Minnelli. They're all phenomenal talents.

I loved being in the theater. It was a place of enormous excitement and happiness and safety and respect and dignity. It was a place where, if you did your job, you weren't a kid - you were a full person worthy of respect from all the adults in the company.

My dad was a really funny, really talented guy who had a great success in a limited audience. But from him, I learned that he always felt the audience was entitled to 150 per cent. If he was performing at an event, he'd keep playing until the last person had finished dancing.

I was accepted to UCLA, but at the same time, I had a job offer at Chicago's Chez Paree nightclub. My father, being a practical man, felt I should take the job.

I'm essentially an actor. And the fact that I got away with singing and dancing for a long time is still a miracle to me.

You are either visual or you're not.

I fell so hard for the theater. I knew it was a place where you can sort out your life.

My mother loved fashion. She was a beauty and had enough sewing skills that she could re-create the looks in magazines. She also was enormously charismatic.

Acting always affects every part of your life because it's such a solitary, lonely, and thrilling circumstance that you're taking on someone else's character and that responsibility. It's exhausting.

I'm about possibilities and about surprises and the life force.

I think there is a lot of loss in being a professional child actor. All of a sudden, you start to want to be an adult at the age of 8 or 9. I never did kid stuff, so to speak, so I was in many ways ostracized by the other kids. But I did get this other life, so it was a trade-off.

There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.

When you are in a good theatre show, it is a wonderful and very fulfilling experience, entertaining a large audience and their showing their appreciation for your efforts.

TDF is more essential today than it was when it was first founded in 1968.

I love being in a show. I love the community aspect of it. I like the discipline of it, too.

I came to realize, along with being attracted to girls, I had similar feelings for boys. All the people close to me have known for years who I am. Yet it took time to embrace that other part of who I always was.