When you walk out onstage in front of 65,000 people, it can bring you to tears.

When I speak at my local church, which I try to do 35 to 40 times a year, I try in every lesson to take the Old Testament text or New Testament text and apply them to what is happening to me or how that applies to the audience that I’m teaching in a modern, fast-changing, technological world. I use headlines, interfaith and that sort of thing.

I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.

I don’t think there is a single social issue I haven’t spoken on.

You’ll never have any trouble with Mr. T, I’m just a big, calm teddy bear kind of guy. Mr. T ain’t ashamed to cry. When I go out and I meet people who are suffering and they come and talk to me, Mr. T cries, Mr. T who could break a man’s jaw with his fist.

How can a president not be an actor?

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer’s avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.

I’ve always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I’m a sucker for it, whether it’s Linkin Park or Little Richard.

I can’t read the newspaper without crying. I’m easily affected by horrible events, you see.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

It could be if I fight in front of one person or one million people. It’s still the same emotions.

If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re going to have to take what they get.

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

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

I’m an emotional person.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.

A career is born in public – talent in privacy.

Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.

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

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

I’ve always had to conquer fear when I’m on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It’s absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I’m okay. It’s like I’m out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me.

I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.

No matter how much you rehearse on that stage, once you add 30,000 screaming people with flashing cameras into the equation, it’s pretty intense.

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I’m not an improv guy. I’m a writer-guy who presents what he’s written.

A person standing in front of an audience without enthusiasm for his subject and his actions is disconnected from his spirit.

The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.

I laugh all the time – at things, people, stuff, whatever. But, I don’t laugh onstage because then it’s serious business.

Wherever I go meeting the public… spreading a message of human values, spreading a message of harmony, is the most important thing.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

I write all my sermons.

Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

I think that if I would talk on a political subject, if I talk about it, it would divide the audience on that issue. That’s not my issue.

Read my lips: no new taxes.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Great is our admiration of the orator who speaks with fluency and discretion.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

I am a very emotional guy. What I love, I do with all I have.

When Caroline Kennedy managed to say ‚you know‘ more than 200 times in an interview with the New York ‚Daily News,‘ and on 130 occasions while talking to ‚The New York Times‘ during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class.

Sometimes I feel like being an intellectual. Sometimes I like to just be aggressive and all the way in my feelings. Sometimes I might be emotional, or sometimes I might drag on the track and be lazy. I just like to share the different states of existence of Kevin Gates with the rest of the world.

When I was younger and did a stand-up gig, it would take me two weeks to recover. Sometimes I’d get so panicked that I would stutter.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

I go onstage and I talk, and I remember what I’m saying, and I track it.

When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it’s Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is.

I love it when people say things to me in public and want to meet me, because I want to meet them! Early on, my manager told me, ‚If you want to sell 500,000 records, then go out there and meet 500,000 people.‘

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life giving speeches.

I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.

I’ve been known to preach.

Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.

I can move any crowd.

I’m much more comfortable and confident running out on the field in front of 70,000 people instead of standing in front of a camera trying to say some lines. The people who do that as a profession are very talented because it’s certainly not easy.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.