Bob Mortimer Quotes

You get very comfortable doing the open mic circuit, turning up to the same places and playing to 20 people. In that situation, it won't matter if you aren't great on that night because no one will really remember who you are. Then suddenly you are doing rooms to 400 people and you have to up your game.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is 50 percent of the performance.

When you're on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn't exactly a sound - it's a hum, like the streets.

I'm not the first one to say it, but that time onstage is a heightened sense of present tense.

Every time an artiste goes on stage, he thinks 'I hope today goes well and I hope I give my best.' That is important - that little bit of nervousness or tension is what makes you perform better.

I stand on stage hoping to give good energy to the audience, but if I cannot give good energy anymore, I will have to leave right away.

Performing live is difficult. But nobody's forcing us to do it.

During a big rock show, you can flub a few things and nobody will hear it, because it gets buried under everything else.

With stand-up you've just got that one chance. Audiences can be quite fickle.

I feel like every time I go out, I want to do a good job. I want people to say that he's just as good at stand-up as he is in some of the movies I've seen him in, so I try to do the best every time I go out there.

If you can play well in the studio, you can play well on stage.

You're in front of an audience, but you're playing for a camera. There's this huge adrenaline rush, because you know that besides the audience in the studio, there are millions of people watching at home.

Onstage, there's no hiding; you either can or can't act. There's no second take.

There's no second chance on stage, and I was trained to make the most of my first chance.

Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.

I feel like I am one of those artists that, thank god, can sing live.

If you go on stage with the wrong attitude, or something in your performance is off, you can lose an audience in the first minute. That first minute is crucial.

Playing for someone else's crowd is always difficult for any band.

It's one of the things that looks good written down, but the reality is that you think about the pieces you're doing and try to bear in mind everyone in the audience.

Playing a stadium is a big adrenaline boost for me and I dig it. It keeps me on my toes and makes me revamp everything I'm doing and not get stagnant with how I approach every show, which is something I like.

You don't really know a song until you play it live.

There's a pressure regardless of that to do a good show.

From the first time you can look in the paper and you accept that you're the entertainment for some people that night, it becomes so much more enjoyable to play live.

When you are performing in theater, you feel so connected to your audience. It's exhilarating!