Shelley Winters Quotes

I prefer theatre to television - you get to feel the love.

The thing about theatre is that when it is actually occurring, when you have the audience on your side, you absolutely think you can will them to do anything. It's exhilarating.

I enjoy being on stage with other artists. I have a chance to watch and see people responding to the other artists songs. I get to see how people are affected by the music.

When you come to my show, I want it to feel like opera, like a theatre.

I mean there’s a certain finality about a movie, when it’s done it’s done – that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There’s a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can’t do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participateI respond to heat. And blood. And humanity. The cold experience is not for me. I’ve always enjoyed all the real people in a room together in the theatre.

One of the hardest things in the world is to perform on record and get someone to enjoy and feel what you're doing. It's unlike, like TV you can, you can fake it with the face and the crying and the bits. Recording is completely different.

As rewarding as a good film role can be, there is just nothing like getting up on a stage and taking an audience for a ride.

When I perform, I like to immerse myself in the music, and I just try to get off on the diversity of music.

I was really sick of bands just ignoring the audience as a posture in rock music. And I think we fed off each other in terms of trying to engage the audience, not in a hammy way, but actually trying to be aware of the space that you are playing in and trying to connect in some way through the music.

Playing live is closer to theatre, although when you're up there on your own, it's quite scary and revealing because you're playing your own songs. It's like a one man show that you've written yourself.

Being an entertainer includes knowing how to connect with an audience.

I feel my live shows are my music; everything blossoms from the live shows.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

Feeling emotionally connected to a song, and accumulating every bit of the moment's energy to sing out to the audience is what I believe makes a great performer.

The best part of touring, still, is touching people's hearts and igniting my band and igniting the people into what you call a spiritual revelation is sound and emotion.

I haven't been to many music events where somebody was performing and it actually made me cry.

I love theatre because it's just me and the audience. It's the litmus test in acting, to be able to sustain a performance over one, two or three hours.

A tour is the most intense, stimulating way to hear music; it's the best form to receive it. There's genuine excitement from people. I feel like we've stepped up a level.

That's one of the good things about music. You get to do it live, where you can touch the people and interact with them.

I always thought that it was every performer's dream. That's the epitome of being an artist, being able to express song, dance and acting in a live theatre setting and really connecting with an audience on that level.

On stage, it is a tremendous thing to be able to make people laugh. But one of the things that I have always loved is when I am in shows where you can turn the audience upside down and make them cry or move them. That is when things are the most rewarding.

I do my best creating on stage.

When you dance and move around it creates a different reaction from the audience - they love it.

When you put the musical in front of an audience, you get to see how the audience reacts.

I appreciate an audience that reacts to the music, even if they jump on stage and try to beat us up, I think that's a fantastic reaction. I think that they're really hearing something then.