Annaleigh Ashford Quotes

I enjoy theater just for the sheer excitement of it and the immediate response that you get, and how every night the audience is a little bit different; but then, it's expensive to work in N.Y., and stage work is limited, so you're just doing it for the art.

Theatricality is a concept. It's not a specific language.

Being back on stage in New York, off-Broadway - I mean, that's an actor's dream.

I was a 200-pound defensive back on Saturday, but after the season, I was performing 'Lysistrata' or 'Fences.'

Being an actor is like being a monk: you have got to be dedicated.

I've been acting my whole life, which people don't realize. I just haven't had the opportunities that I've had with my dancing.

There are different types of art, and you just have to follow where things take you. It helps me with my desire to perform live. That's something that a lot of actors and actresses don't get to experience on a regular basis.

I grew up always wanting to be a dancer and when I went to New York, I fell in love with the idea of performing in all ways.

Theater is the only thing I always came back to. When I was 9, I asked my mom if I could be on TV. She was like, "Well, okay. You can try."

I am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.

I went to the University of Minnesota to study art. I left the university to come to New York and live in Soho. I got involved with like a small kind of like experimental theater-mime company and we discovered that Étienne Decroux, a great mime, was still teaching in Paris so I went to study with him for several years.

Acting has been my passion from the minute I started. I was pretty young when I wanted to be a doctor, but when I started doing theater work as a freshman in high school, the first time I hit the stage I was like, If I can do this every day, life won't get any better!

There's an art to playing live. It's a great feeling. It's indescribable. It's what I love. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it.

A concert is not a live rendition of our album. It's a theatrical event. I have fun with my clothes onstage; it's not a concert you're seeing, it's a fashion show.

When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.

Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.

I love to act, I love to sing and I love to entertain, so if I am passionate about a certain project and I want to do it, I hope to stretch my acting skills.

New York City is still the art capital - every time I'm in New York, I'm thinking about competition.

If I want to do the kind of work that I like to act in, I need to open my mind to it.

On stage you're free. You can say and do things that if you said and did any place else, you'd be arrested.

If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body.

I had no idea about where I was going. I had no sense of art as anything other than a problem to be fixed, you know, an itch to be scratched. I was in that studio trying my best to feel content with myself. I had, like, a stipend. I had a place to sleep. I had a studio to work in. I had nothing else to think about, you know. And that's - that was a huge luxury in New York City.

I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.

For me, the only type of guilty pleasure fun that I have in terms of my career is I act once in awhile. And I don't have any responsibility.

I was studying acting in New York, and wasn't being hired by anyone to do anything other than to work in an Oriental rug warehouse.