Diana Ross Quotes

When people say that L.A. doesn't have a culture, I think it really does: a very old culture, and very specific. There's streets named after entertainers, and statues of entertainers, and it's great. Entertainment is still art, even if it makes billions of dollars. So it's like a city built on entertainment, and art in a way.

I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.

The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.

I ran track and played football... I was an all-American.

I've always been an entertainer. It's in my blood, in the sense that I've always loved doing it.

I'm in show business, and I'm an entertainer, but I also see myself as an artist doing social and spiritual work.

The art helps, between the acting gigs. I feel that if I can sing in Mamma Mia! then goddammit, I can hang a few paintings, give people lots of cocktails, and have a good time.

I have some sort of performing gene that's just there and I cannot explain it but I want to connect with people through a camera or on a stage. I just can do it. I just have an intuitive sense of it. So I love doing that, I love going into that trance.

If you're black, you can't just be ordinary. All successful black people are extraordinary. If you are tremendously successful, and you're black, you are extraordinary, or you wouldn't stand out in this world.

I like entertaining people. I like being on stage. I like being in the life. This is what I do. This is the only thing I know how to do besides rob people and fight. Even when I was robbing people, I was entertaining them. But that's just what I love doing.

I just wanted to be in show biz. I wanted to make music and sing and dance, tell jokes and stories, make ya smile, make ya cry - and charge you $ 8.50

I always wanted to be a performer, I didn't know exactly what kind of performer, all I knew was there were certain things that I liked. I liked movies a whole lot, and I loved music.

There are many stars and a few super-stars in sport. There are champions who bag a coronet now and then, and there are others who dominate some game year after year. In other words there are Bobby Jones and Helen Wills.

I want people to see my movies. My talent, my sensibilities are what people want to see in the movies... While I have the talent to make the kind of movies people want to see I want to continue to do that, keep making big pictures and make what I love. I’m really just making the films I want to see. There’s not a strategy.

I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?

I became an entertainer not because I wanted to but because I was meant to.

As professional actors, it's our job to entertain our audiences while setting benchmarks for ourselves as well, creatively and intellectually.

I remember enjoying writing those, theres two clues of a gift: you enjoy doing it and people enjoy you doing it.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

I was a creative kid; I wasn't really into sports, and sports in the South are a pretty big deal. It's like a religion down there. It was tough to find my footing, but thankfully, my parents discovered, through a neighbor, this theater called Young Actors Theater and signed me up for the summer program. It really was a gift. Even if a kid doesn't go into acting or the arts like I did, some kids need that environment to find themselves and find what they love to do. I'm so thankful for that theater; it was a big gift to me.

All I've ever wanted to do is entertain people - make them laugh, think, smile, feel creeped out or scared; whatever it is. I'm getting the opportunity to do that in various roles.

Normal people do not create art.

Musicians have the power to influence people and along with movie makers, they can reach and influence more people than any group of people, more than scientists and certainly more than politicians.

Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw even an elemental trait of painting or sculpture.

I feel blessed that I get to be part of entertaining people in any capacity.