Adnan Sami Quotes

When you're onstage and you know you're bombing, that's very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going - you're bombing, but you can't stop.

I'm learning to cope and not deny my own success, but I still think it's not happening a lot. I get nervous, and I am capable of doing something to blow it on purpose. A lot of actors have that problem.

I used to feel very tired during tournaments. I was drinking four or five coffees per day and felt I needed more.

When I stepped up a division I can remember suffering the worst fatigue I had ever felt. I noticed it massively.

When I started performing I was like, "Holy hell, how am I going to survive this?" I was giving it my all in 15 minutes but now I had to do it for two hours.

The thing that helped me come to terms with performing was an anxiety, a desperation for acceptance. There was never enough positive motivation in my life.

When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.

I'm just terrible at auditions. I don't know how anyone does it.

The hardest role that I've ever tried to play was Clara Johnson in 'Light in the Piazza' at Lincoln Center. It was the least fun I've ever had, but the most beautiful experience I've ever had. I could not understand her. I could not put my feet in her shoes. I came home every night, and I was depressed.

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.

So much of performing is a mind game. You're memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.

The first time I toured with the 'Large Band' in 1988, I got so tired. If I just stood still anywhere, I could go to sleep. I was that tired. But I had to perform. And I did, and after that tour, I was much less fretful about going out onstage.

Yeah... I was a singer as a kid. I had a lot of stage fright, and what's happened with 'Idol,' it has got me past so much of that.

I could beat my mike stand into the stage, but I was still in pain. Maybe fans liked it, but sometimes people forget you're a person and they're more into the entertainment value. It's taken a long time to turn that around and give a strong show without it being a kamikaze show.

I get pretty terrified, to be honest, when I'm on tour. You really have to muster a lot of ego to go our there, which I find rather draining.

I was really awful at auditions. There's something about sitting down and saying into the camera: 'I'm Nina and this is the name of my agent.' That makes me just die inside.

I wish I didn't have to perform 'Iron Man' every night.

I still enjoy performing, whether it's in front of two people or 2,000 people, but it's not fun once you leave the big show.

I'm always exhausted after a show, even if it's just half an hour.

I like performing, but I usually get really sick when I'm on tour, and it's just hard.

There've been times where, like when I auditioned for 'Akeelah,' I think in the first audition I was a little bit afraid because it was, you know, I had seen girls in there that I had seen on TV before, and I was like, 'Man, I might as well just walk out of here now because I'm just a newcomer,' and this and that.

When I have a bad show, I can't wait until I can get back on stage to forget about it.

It was a nerve-wracking first few years having to tour and perform in front of people with the little bit of confidence I had.

The performance anxiety I had is still there. I've been given different kinds of tools and learned how to manage it.

Sometimes you have a good game and mentally you are very tired.