Quotes & Sayings About Great Performances

I would love to document the Roots; I think they have an interesting story. I have a curiosity about them. Their musicality and their live performances I think would be great, and I have a feeling that there are stories behind each one of them. — Michael Rapaport

There are some movies that deserve criticism. They want people to know that it's a great dramatic accomplishment and has some great performances in it. But, c'mon. Yes, you will have some fun if you go see 'Snakes on a Plane.' Snakes are biting people - and they're biting them right on screen. There's nothing to review. It's not 'Snakes on the Waterfront.' You don't have snakes going, 'I coulda been a constrictor.' No. Hell no. It's 'Snakes on a Plane.' — Samuel L. Jackson

I'll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there's some great comedy minds and performances. — Mel Brooks

My manager came up with the idea of taking a Pro Tool rig out on the road to record every night and I thought it was a great idea. I felt like it would be good to record over a certain period of time and then take the best performances of that collection of recordings. It appealed to me that it wasn't going to be from just one location. — Josh Turner

I've always appreciated great acting performances, but I've even learned to appreciate not so great ones 'cause it's hard. — Zoe Bell

It's a joy to be up close to Derek Jacobi's work. Alas, we haven't worked very much, over the years, since we were at university together, but I don't think I've missed many of his great shows and performances. — Ian McKellen

You have to know everything. You have to know how to light a scene. You have to know all this technical stuff about directing. No, you don't. You can know as much or as little as you have to. Your main job is to get great performances and tell the story correctly and capture it correctly. Then it's just basically yours to complicate or simplify as much as you want. — Paul Feig

What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it. — Andrea Bocelli

The Old Vic has always been first and foremost an actors' theatre, a home for great talent and memorable performances. — Kevin Spacey

I turned on VH1 this morning just to get a little warm-up before I came over here, and I think it's just terrific. There's so much great stuff: diverse and wonderful music, good performances, great looking girls, great videos, the whole thing. — Debbie Harry

That's what really makes great skating competitions. When you have two top skaters in good form giving superb performances. — Dick Button

World War Z was a great zombie film because those were zombie performances. It wasn't just a bunch of people walking around slow. They did close-ups on zombies who were performing, as a mindless dead thing. They were creepy and scary. — Tom Savini

When the album was done I loved it. It was a mixture of electric and acoustic solo performances with dubs. I called it Le Noise, after Dan. It was a French Canadian joke, a very English was of saying Lanois. I was doing a show that introduced a lot of the songs, and things were going great. I was very happy. — Neil Young

I was in New York for a little while, doing some really bad theater. I did some great stuff, too, but there were Saturday morning theater performances in one-third-filled church basements. So, I paid my dues. — Silas Weir Mitchell

Everyone knows 'Smash' is about musical numbers, and everyone knows we have fantastic dance sequences and great performances. — Raza Jaffrey

Ageing destroys youth, sickness destroys health, degeneration of life destroys all excellent qualities and death destroys life. Even if you are a great runner, you cannot run away from death. you cannot stop death with your wealth, through your magic performances or recitation of mantras or even medicines. Therefore, it is wise to prepare for your death. — Dalai Lama

I don't care to analyze acting. On the other hand there is a fascination because distributors are putting out British films. You get films here with great performances you'll never see again. Why compare. We should go after the businessmen. — Tim Roth

It was very much about performances, the whole ensemble thing was just great - everybody working together. Sometimes it didn't feel like a film set. It wasn't technically driven, it was very, very enjoyable. — Cillian Murphy

People love events - they love performances, they love music - and I think Australians are great entertainers. — Cate Blanchett

I've really enjoyed the independent film world. I've had a blast. But, the reality is that I really want to make bigger movies. If I could make movies that carry great characters and great performances and great pathos, and can have an explosion or two, that would be fine with me. — Matthew Lillard

Floyd Mayweather is in the sport to give great performances. — Floyd Mayweather Jr.

The letters I really love are from young actresses who were worried they had to fit a certain look. They say I've opened it up. And I don't just mean plus-size girls. You can push things now. With all the great performances in 'Bridesmaids', it changed how people see funny women. — Melissa McCarthy

Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years. — Scott Aukerman

I'm not very comfortable with watching my performances. I don't particularly find a great joy in it. Everything is the process of making it, of getting it, getting the job, saying yes to the job. Those are the joys. Making it is the greatest joy. And then, you have to show the bloody thing. You have to show and tell, be judged. But I don't listen. I don't pay much attention. I hear the rumblings of greatness or the arrows of discontent and harsh words. Then you go, "Oh God. Why?" — Pierce Brosnan

After a while, your coaching development ceases to be about finding newer ways to organize practice. In other words, you soon stop collecting drills. Your development as a coach shifts to observing how great coaches teach, motivate, lead, and drive players to performances at higher and higher levels — Anson Dorrance

I felt that let's understand that all these people are just human, even the advisors in the White House, they're just real people trying to make real decisions and they make mistakes like anybody else does under pressure. If you can get that with these great performances then you claim it on that level as well. — Gerard Butler

From the very beginning, I started doing music performances with a lot of theatrical aspects to them, where humor was a part of it but not necessarily had to be. Humor is just another tool to make the palette more rich and interesting for myself and eventually for the public. It's a great way to break out of convention. — Aleksey Igudesman

So the recordings were these immersive landscapes, and yet, unlike the performances that almost no one would see, I had a sense that these could live forever. I was just starting to get my head around the democratic aspect of art; I didn't want to make rarefied things that were either alienatingly obscure or elite and art-worldy, so a recording that anyone could buy was a great medium. — Miranda July

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature - both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it. — Shirley Hazzard

Classical music, fortunately or not, unfolds in time. It's not like a picture you can stare at for 10 seconds or 10 hours. You need the minimum amount of education and training, and society needs to find a way to study music - not only the performances, but how to compose, how to understand why Mozart was great at what he did. — Carlo Grante

I'm always more comfortable and in a good place when I'm with friends because I know they trust me. I'm able to get great performances from people who trust me. — Lee Daniels

Look, if you want to wear a blindfold and stumble around your house bumping into things to learn how to play 'blind,' you can do that. A lot of actors do. You can block your hearing and not speak. But great performances are based on truth. And the truth is that you, Rob Lowe, can hear and you can speak. — Rob Lowe

Until you win a series, it's difficult to place yourself in that elite group of great Lions players. It's not enough to produce one-off performances or be nearly-men. — Brian O'Driscoll

If you really want to judge the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Watch a man do his most common actions. — Swami Vivekananda

I never knew cocaine to improve anything. When the white lines came out, it was time to call it a night: the music could only get worse. If I joined in, the next day's playback would provide clear evidence of the deterioration of both the performances and of my critical ability to judge them. I suspect that the surge in cocaine's popularity explains - at least in part - why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade. — Joe Boyd

I was with the Jessie Bonstelle Stock Company in Detroit and Buffalo for three seasons - 10 performances and a new play every week. She was an amazing woman who did a great deal for me. — Katharine Cornell

We have to have great pitching performances from our guys, and we have to take it from there. — Bobby Bonilla

Perhaps it is the fate of all great sporting performances to be forgotten somewhat if the team eventually loses. Would we care overly about VVS Laxman's 281 or Ian Botham's 149 without the efforts of Harbhajan Singh and Bob Willis who turned these great feats from potentially heroic failures to match-winning epics? — Keith Stael

No matter how many great performances or exciting visuals we put together for the movie, we found that it was all somewhat two dimensional until we added the emotional heart of Howard Shore's music. Then, and only then, did the film come to life. — Peter Jackson

Theater was definitely part of my roots. My father would take me to plays, and then my mother was always on the lookout for other talent and taking me to see plays. I saw Frank Langella in 'Dracula' ... Great, great performances. I was a theater rat, hanging out backstage. — Christian Slater

I am thrilled yet overwhelmed. There are so many great women athletes, some incredible performances. — Nancy Greene

Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent-this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). But the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To his inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the world; but that can also be shamed if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate. — Paul Goodman

The appearance and retirement of actors are the great events of the theatrical world; and their first performances fill the pit with conjecture and prognostication, as the first actions of a new monarch agitate nations with hope and fear. — Samuel Johnson

One of the things about being a minority actor is that you don't have that opportunity as some of your counterparts to keep that flow, to constantly be going from one thing to the other, so when you see really great performances out there by some black folks, you know it's coming from somewhere deep, because they just don't work as much. — Georg Stanford Brown

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world. — Alexander McCall Smith

Great individuals and great performances build a team, which produces brilliant performances. — Sachin Tendulkar

I don't come to work as an actor. There are many directors who can direct without ever having acted and do a great job and connect with their actors and lead them to excellent performances without themselves having had an acting background. — Abdellatif Kechiche

Emma, you and your poetry, me and my acting--what are we trying to do? We can't top this city. We poor would-be artists can't compete with or improve on the rich density of human experience on any random, average, slow summer night in New York--who are we trying to kid? In the overheard conversation in the elevator, in the five minutes of talk the panhandler gives you before hitting you for the handout, in the brief give-and-take when you are going out and the cleaning lady is coming in--there are the real stories, incredible, heartbreaking and ridiculous, there are the command performances, the Great American Novels but forever unwritten, untoppable, and so beautifully unaware. — Wilton Barnhardt

I would love to get great performances from actors as a director, because that's what I'm always looking for, a director that's going to help me go places I've never been before. — Aaron Eckhart

... the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.
From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781, on Alexander Pope — Samuel Johnson

If you really want to judge of the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Every fool may become a hero at one time or another. Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be. — Swami Vivekananda

I make films from the heart. I want to concentrate on the job of doing great and honest performances, and I'm gonna get better with every performance of mine, with every film of mine. — John Abraham

The intimate conversations have its moments, because you have to sell the characters, because there is so much going on. It's so easy to get lost in the special effects and forget about the performances. The dialogue scenes have been great. It's been great working with Bryan and the writers to find where we're going and what's the story. Yeah, it's been really, really interesting. — Eleanor Tomlinson

I think 'SNL' is so well-known for its musical performances, as well, and people really breaking into America through a really great performance on there. So I think me and Gotye are both really excited to be amongst such company. You know, it's great. — Kimbra

My wife, Barbara, is great. She arranges when I do work that I have a day off between performances. — Don Rickles

When I was eighteen, River Phoenix was far and away my hero. Think of all those early great performances - My Own Private Idaho. Stand by Me. I always wanted to meet him. One night, I was at this Halloween party, and he passed me. He was beyond pale - he looked white. Before I got a chance to say hello, he was gone, driving off to the Viper Room, where he fell over and died. That's a lesson. — Leonardo DiCaprio

I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music. — Peter Maxwell Davies

Directing was a great experience, but it's terrifying to have the responsibility of carving up the other actors' performances. — John Krasinski

I do feel that scripts get developed now to a point where they're sort of actor-proof. If the actor is not very good, the narrative still survives because it's all in the dialogue. Not to say there aren't great performances in English-language films, because there are every year, but the 1970s were awash with great performances, and I was wondering whether it had to do with the amount of space and the amount of responsibility given to the actors. — Paul Bettany

James Gandolfini was a genius. Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that. He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time ... A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, 'You don't get it. You're like Mozart.' — David Chase

The sign of a great player is how much he elevates his colleagues' performance. — Phil Jackson

The old forms of entertainment are not extinct. Live performances are the pinnacle. If you can something that people want to see live, then you have a great career. — Bette Midler

The Academy Awards were basically created by the industry to promote pictures. They weren't really to acknowledge the performances. Then it became sort of this a great popularity contest and now, it's an incredible show and it's seen all over the world. — James Cromwell

When you're a first time director, you're often considered what's called a "deadly attachment" in the eyes of financiers, because they're trusting you with a lot of money to bring something home, to get great performances, to not have a nervous breakdown in the process. — John Krokidas

If you are a star in Hollywood then you are always a star in your eyes, but not always in the eyes of new directors for whom your great performances are always fading into the past. — Lee Grant

It is tragic that we have lost one of our nation's finest actors in the prime of his life. Heath Ledger's diverse and challenging roles will be remembered as some of the great performances by an Australian actor. — Kevin Rudd

Lizzy Weiss is such a great writer, and she really writes for the performances. — Vanessa Marano

Every time I go to Europe, I remember that James Dean never saw Europe, but yet I see his face everywhere. There's James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe - windows of the Champs Elysees, discos in the south of Spain, restaurants in Sweden, t-shirts in Moscow. My life was confused and disoriented for years by his passing. My sense of destiny destroyed - the great films he would have directed, the great performances he would have given, the great humanitarian he would have become, and yet, he's the greatest actor and star I have ever known. — Dennis Hopper

External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe ... That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real. — Saul Bellow

You spend enough time on set as an actor and it's great when a director was at some point an actor or understands acting. They're able to finesse performances out of you that a lot directors can't get. — Ian Somerhalder

I love the live performances and Las Vegas. I also like making films that are being discovered by another generation. Having been a teen idol of the '60s is great because you realize you left your generation with a smile and good memories. — Connie Stevens

I don't think it's necessary to be an actor to get great performances out of an actor. But I do think it helps me as a director because I know what I like as an actor, and I try to get that to the actors who I'm working with. — Steve Buscemi

This is of great importance, to watch carefully, - now I am so weak - not to over fatigue myself, because then I cannot contribute to the pleasure of others; and a placid face and a gentle tone will make my family more happy than anything else I can do for them. Our own will gets sadly into the performances of our duties sometimes (Elizabeth T. King). — Mary W. Tileston