Top 1200 Great Performance Quotes & Sayings - Page 8

There's so many variables in comedy. Comedy is not this thing that's a performance like a play. It's really an interaction with every single person in the room. And if there's a weirdness in the room for any people, be it something the comedians did at the top of the set or be it the mixture of the people isn't right, something can go awry. So it's really great to see you proven wrong about someone.

When I was a kid in the business, you always had in the back of your head this feeling that if I screw up, I might be fired. So you went out every night and tore your rear end up to make sure that you gave the best performance you can and learning constantly because you never had that idea of 'I'm so great, I'm never going to be fired.'

Great beauty, great strength, and great riches are really and truly of no great use; a right heart exceeds all

I have never had great expectations of my performance or of a film. I try not to think about the outcome. If you look that far ahead, it sort of taints your choices as an actor. I try as hard as I can to believe that no one is ever going to see it and that it's not even a movie. Then you can allow yourself to bare more. Then, once a project is done, I tend to forget about it until it comes out.

Great Power, capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation. Let us take warning from the fate of the Great Powers of the past and not burst ourselves with pride .

I was very happy with Vampire's Kiss, which in my opinion was almost like an independent laboratory to start realizing some of my more expressionistic dreams with film performance. Then using what I had learned in Vampire's Kiss and putting it into a very big action movie in the form of Face/Off with John Woo. If you look at those two movies back to back, you can see where I stole from my performance in Vampire's Kiss.

I love theater, a performance and designing a visual spectacle. It is like creating a composition with clothes, which have to fit the psychology as well as the body of characters. The performance is frozen in time, the clothes have to stay reliable and help to define the story. Fashion can be much more abstract. It needs no story because the woman is the story. She supplies the text and content. Fashion for retail is the opposite of frozen, it has to change and morph constantly to stay relevant - to be the "fashion.".

Great groups deliver great results. And for everyone involved in a great group, great work is its own reward.

Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.

To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.

I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.

I sustained an injury by singing with the flu during the second performance of Andrea Chenier in Buenos Aires. I was very sick, with chills and sweats, but against my better judgement I let them talk me into singing. Of course I gave the performance everything I had and my voice was hurt. It was scary at first, but fortunately there was no permanent damage. I just had to be patient and wait for the voice to return. It took six weeks of physical recuperation and it took time to recover my confidence as well.

A great commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will grow a great church.

Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man and a saint. It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God - men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These can mold a generation for God.

Great groups give the lie to the remarkably persistent but incorrect notion that successful organizations are the lengthened shadow of a great woman or man. However, each great group has a strong leader. In fact, great groups and great leaders create each other.

There is no field of activity for great men without the coming of great wars, great struggles and great revolutions.

'Liberace's a great film. It's a great piece of material. I have a great script and it's a great score.

The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.

I find that all great directors, and I would include Ben Affleck and Clint Eastwood in that, they have great confidence. And with great confidence comes great freedom for the actor.

Because 98 percent of our ideas are not great ideas, or everyone would be a billionaire. So yeah. That's something people have had a lot of experience in: being told our idea is bad or our performance is bad. I think that's the one common thread between all working actors is that they have a pretty thick skin - or you'd like to hope. You're used to rejection, that's for sure.

Originally I had a fear of rejection at the auditions, which is a lack of self-confidence ultimately. Now I have a production company and when you can look behind the scenes at the casting process, you know it's not about rejection. It might have been the most amazing performance ever, but if the person is too tall, too short, too brown, too white, has blond hair or whatever it is, then not getting the gig may have nothing to do with the performance. You have to learn to treat auditioning as matter-of-factly as drinking a glass of water.

We have such fantastic talent in India, and there are some great Marathi singers, great sound producers, great sound engineers, and a great breed of lyric writers. But the problem is that you need a platform.

You can't be Eazy-E and not move a certain way, basically. So, I studied the culture of it, and also, one of my uncles is from L.A., and he's great. He was like my performance coach. He helped me get the lingo down pat. He helped me get a lot of things down pat because I would talk in that accent for 10 hours a day.

When you have a movie that has big stars in it... like, Will Smith does a great job in 'I Am Legend,' and it's a magnetic performance, but he's always Will Smith. That's not his fault. That's not anyone's fault. He's the center of it, and he's a movie star. But when you see something like 'Jurassic Park,' Sam Neill is Alan Grant.

Don't lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations.

The crowd is a performer. En masse, a crowd has its own personality, its own character. And there are going to be nights when the crowd delivers a great performance. And there are going to be nights when the crowd bombs.

People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as "the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken."... Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.

For sure working with Ferrari is a great pleasure. It's a great team, it's a great experience and it's a great dream as well to be there.

To go into more specifics regarding actors, whether they're from Korea or the U.S., all actors know if they are loved by the director. When they feel that love from the director, they respond by giving a great performance on camera. Also, everyone on set - the crew, the actors - they were aware of the film's message and its broad theme, so these big issues were never discussed on set.

We did all the standard camp numbers: "Down By The Aegean," "I Am My Own Great-Great-Great-Great Grandpa," "This Land is Minos's Land.

I get to play a great character while working with great actors and great directors on a great show.

Remember that failure is part of the process of successful running. Performance is a roller coaster; to think otherwise is irrational and will cause you much stress and discouragement. Lighten up on yourself. Ups and downs can be expected. The performance of most serious runners fluctuates by the week. You win some, you lose some; some days you're hot, some days you're not. Don't fight with yourself when failure, the teacher, pays an unexpected visit. Open up to learning from it.

Working in television it's really great to be able to stick with a character for a long period of time. It's not like you have one shot, and that's it. You have more time, more room, an ability to reflect on your performance and the character and how much has really been shown, and what you'd like to see. It's nice. You have more breathing room.

I had paid for my folly and, as a reward, was invited to take part in the nest builder’s performance piece. The script was great. ‘When I bleat here, do you want me to just bleat or to really let go and “bleat, bleat”?’ I asked. ‘I feel like “bleat, bleating,” but if Mother/Destroyer is going to be crawling through the birth canal of concertina wire, I don’t want to steal focus, you know what I mean?

I'm giving up acting. . . . I'm 66 and there are a number of celebrations I've got to get down on paper, and acting doesn't allow me to do that. It was a hell of a drug, performance. It's a great thrill, especially for a storyteller. But it can go. Directing can go. Writing can't go. And in terms of what lies ahead, I want to have a burning focus - almost like smoke coming up from the paper as I write.

I wrote [Valley of Violence] entirely with James Ransone in mind. I get such a joy out of watching his performance and seeing people watch this. He's so great. The bravado thing and the foolishness, he does them both so well. It's weird because he's so hateable in the movie, but in the end, you're also going, "I feel bad for him." That's hard to do. It's hard to do that to where you're like, "This guy's the worst, but I know why he's the worst, so it's a shame this is happening." That's the whole thing.

We might think of dollars as being 'certificates of performance.' The better I serve my fellow man, and the higher the value he places on that service, the more certificates of performance he gives me. The more certificates I earn, the greater my claim on the goods my fellow man produces. That's the morality of the market. In order for one to have a claim on what his fellow man produces, he must first serve him.

Frequent comparative ranking can only reinforce a short-term investment perspective. It is understandably difficult to maintain a long-term view when, faced with the penalties for poor short-term performance, the long-term view may well be from the unemployment line ... Relative-performance-oriented investors really act as speculators. Rather than making sensible judgments about the attractiveness of specific stocks and bonds, they try to guess what others are going to do and then do it first.

A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage... For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.

There's a lot of research that indicates the brain rewards us for multi-tasking by giving us a shot of neurochemicals whenever we start a new task. Our brain rewards us even as our performance in every task degrades. We don't even notice that our performance is bad. We don't care. We feel like masters of the universe because our brain is chemically rewarding us for multi-tasking.

I've worked for more than 50 years on the stage and I have played great, great, great roles, but I haven't played a great Shakespearean role because they're all male. I'm actually very proud of it.

All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don' t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.

Own it. Just take it and say, 'Yes I will be great, I am going to be great.' Great doesn't mean being a movie star, great doesn't mean having millions of dollars. Great means being able to be confident, strong, and a solid human being that has dignity and integrity. That is great.

In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

My struggle isn't believing my performance can earn God's favor; my struggle is believing my performance can keep God's favor

Comedians work great as actors because they're good under pressure. With a lot of actors, you have to make them feel like everything's going really well to get a good performance out of them. But, if you have a comedian on the set, you can tell them, 'Hey, you really are screwing this up,' and then they just get better.

I've never acted before in a movie I've directed. This felt like the time to do it just because the " Leaves of Grass" movie itself is so much of a platform for the lead actor. It's really written for an exciting performance and it really depends on the audience watching an extraordinary actor having a great time pulling off this feat. It makes sense to me as a director to act in support of that.

I try to take off the rose-colored glasses and view it in all facets, but I probably would be lying if I didn't say that probably the way in for a film with me is the performance. But I have been on juries where you have to give Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography. So you do have to put on several different hats and I try to broaden my scope. And what's great is, when you're in a room full of people who are not your milieu, so to speak, you find yourself speaking in a way that you do discover a slightly discerning eye.

Congratulation s to my friends and all the team of famous the Dance of the Vampires! As the Chagal of the German production, I'm so proud of you. The performance of Le Bal des Vampires - Le Musical was amazing and well done. Also bravo to director Roman Pola?ski. A huge success of the most successful and powerful director in the world. Great to be in the family of Chagal's of #? TdV 's!

I wish I was a great writer or a great journalist or a great scientist or a great artist; I'm not.

This is a turf battle. They are saying, 'The songwriters aren't getting paid.' Baloney. Songwriters are getting paid. They're paid sync rights and (mechanical) rights. They aren't getting paid for the public performance in a download because there is no public performance in a download.

Great hearts can only be made by great troubles. Great faith must have great trials.

Sports is a perfect activity in which to see streaks and cycles, organizational and otherwise, in action - and to watch confidence build or erode. There are repeated episodes of performance with similar rules and clear winners or losers. I added team sports to my studies of business because there are excellent parallels to work groups in the performance of sports teams and also excellent parallels to larger, more complex businesses or organizations in the strategy, structure, and culture surrounding any particular team.

The single most damaging misconception about strategy is that it is a set of financial performance goals. The so-called "strategies" created by many managements are nothing more than three-to-five year financial performance forecasts. They are then labeled "strategy" and shipped off to the board of directors which goes through the motions of discussing how big the numbers are. Strategy is not your aspirations. Strategy is concerned with how you will arrange your actions and resources to punch through the challenges you face.

I'm really excited that people are receiving my performance like this. It makes me feel good, because I've been working really hard. And this character [Idi Amin], I worked particularly hard on. But I don't want to get too caught up in it, because first of all, it could lead to a great disappointment. You never know what's going to happen.

No head coach does it by himself. I don't care who the coach is or how great he might be. Mike Krzyzewski is is a great friend of mine and he's a great coach but he has great, great assistant coaches and they bring a lot to the table and that's what it takes.

He only is great at heart who floods the world with a great affection. He only is great of mind who stirs the world with great thoughts. He only is great of will who does something to shape the world to a great career. And he is greatest who does the most of all these things and does them best.

I feel like there's a currency to your personal life and your performance - your acting, your work. If that personal life starts to outweigh what the work is, then your work suffers. Your actual performance suffers because the audience won't see the character, they'll see you.

You have as great an opportunity for satisfaction in the performance of your duty as I do in mine. The progress of this work will be determined by our joint efforts. Whatever your calling, it is as fraught with the same kind of opportunity to accomplish good as is mine. What is really important is that this is the work of the Master. Our work is to go about doing good as did He.