Paul O'Grady Quotes

I'm energized by this idea that's live television. In the same way as an athlete when they get on the field or on the court, you have to perform in that moment or it's past you and you've missed.

I've been a live performer longer than I've been a television performer. For me, live is where it's at.

The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There's no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It's a high-wire act. That excites me.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

The show is different every night, because I never write a setlist.

Whereas with us - what you hear is what's happening right then and there on the stage - so we don't need no stinking technology.

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

There's something about the rawness of the live thing, there's no rhythm guitars behind the solo, nothing other than what you hear the people playing at that moment. It's exciting, it's about the performance.

Comedy is a live art, and the only way to record a comedy rock album is to do it live. The audience and their laughter is just as much a part of the album sound as our music. No retakes, no room for error.

I don't practice or write stuff down - everything I do onstage was just made up before I went on.

My records are one thing. My live performances are something totally different because they're very improvised performances.

I love musical theater because it's live. There is no Auto-Tune. There's no second chance. What you see is what you get. You have to be amazing every night.

Some nights you just can't predict what's going to happen live for an hour.

The main thing with my shows is that I'm professional but not highly polished. I don't like people to think they're just seeing an album in person.

When we perform music at TV shows, we always try to do something that's not scripted because anything that's a surprise for the audience and the crew and the other performers, it works better on camera and for the people back home, too.

No matter where I go, I never write the setlist until I'm at the venue.

Sometimes on my show, I just play something out of the blue, and the band picks up on it.

When you do an arena show, and the lights have to sync up to the sound, and the sound has to sync up to the music, and all of that - things are really mapped out, and you lose some of that spontaneity.

Stand-up is still my job. That is the thing I wanted to get into when I was 21. You cannot beat the immediacy of it, making people laugh without any interruptions or edits.

Back in the fifties I was the hot, young comic on CBS and a regular on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' I was also starring in shows on Broadway and acting in dramatic programs on television. Those were the glory days of television. It was like theater. It was live. If an actor forgot a line, he improvised. There was an immediacy to it.

In film you have the opportunity of retakes or of giving your best profile. In theatre, it's right here, right now.

When it's a live performance, anything can happen.

What I love about improv so much is that we are all discovering it at roughly the same time. The performers are maybe, what, a half second ahead of the audience? There's very little lag time. I think of a thing, I say it, then the audience is laughing and it all happened in a second.

I feel like I've gotten myself comfortable making beats in front of people, so like, if I'm in a big room of people, I'm not like, nervous. I wanna be able to make beats on the spot.

In the performance sense, I find that interpretation is improvisatory in nature. You can go anywhere with an interpretation on any given day.