I can’t act!

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

There’s been a lot of talk of me being a one-man show but that’s simply not the case. We win games when I score 40 points and we’ve won when I score 10.

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.

I like talking. I like acting.

Doing a show for three weeks is nothing like doing a show for seven seasons.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

My favorite movies of all times is ‚Doctor Zhivago,‘ and I love ‚Gone With the Wind.‘ I’d love to play some Southern belle or something where I owned a plantation.

My mom always wanted me to be an actor. And I started going to theater and going on auditions young.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee you that.

Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn’t.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

Dancing in high heels is kind of tough. I learn the dances without the heels, and then we add them. We just practice, and I get used to it. My feet hurt really badly at the end of the shows, but it’s fun. While it’s happening it’s fun. I feel tall.

When you are in good form, you keep hitting the target. You may have the best match but you may still not have the goals. But scoring is most important and it feels so good that I have been knocking them in. It really boosts the morale.

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

I still get very scared when I step in front of a live audience.

We think it’s fun for our kids to have cameos and join us on set, but not to be actors. That’s not our goal for Brad and me at all. I think we would both prefer that they didn’t become actors.

My act is an exaggeration of a part of me. I’m much more expressive off stage.

Actors know what actors are insecure about – and they’re all insecure.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

I get nervous when I don’t get nervous. If I’m nervous I know I’m going to have a good show.

Stand-up is my baby.

‚Via Dolorosa‘ is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and I’ll never act again.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

I once wanted to prove myself by being a great actress. Now I want to prove that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll be a great actress.

I don’t really focus on these things – on what tags are given to me or what people think of me off the field – stuff like that. My main focus is always to do well on the field for the Indian cricket team. When people say good things about me off the field, I am more than happy to accept them.

I want to play a fireman and a spy. I want to learn special effects.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy.

I have an immense amount of respect for acting. I’ve always loved movies and was always fascinated by movie-making. But to become an actor, I wanted to commit myself.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

There are some singers that know exactly when to go, and others hang on much too long and that is the same, that is the same with judges.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

You don’t know when you’re being watched. That’s one of the weird things about celebrity. It’s my least favorite part of acting, celebrity.

How you go about testing is just very different to just being in the situation of qualifying, having to go out, having to nail the lap.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

There is a lot of pressure put on me, but I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself. I feel if I play my game, it will take care of itself.

In my opinion, the only way to conquer stage fright is to get up on stage and play. Every time you play another show, it gets better and better.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

Dancers are always striving for perfection. A great dancer never achieves it: you always want to do another turn, a higher jump,a more difficult acrobatic jump.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.

A chorus is not easy.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

My show ‚The Big House‘ was picked up; they flew me to New York. I’m about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart’s ‚The Big House.‘ And a hand grabs my shoulder, ‚Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.‘ It’s a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can’t.

I never wanted to stay in one genre; I never wanted to be pigeon-holed or defined as the actor who only worked in one genre. I want to be able to work in all different genres. For me it’s fun, and that’s how I grow as an actor.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

What I do is just go over and over and over my lines and learn the script so well that I can just be easy and relaxed. That’s the way I always work.