Sarah Paulson Quotes

There are some actors who come alive in front of a crowd, and if you've cast it right, there's an energy between cast and audience that can be exhilarating for both parties, then enjoyed by the audience at home.

When you know you have 1,000 people sitting on the edge of their seats in silence because of a shift that just happened on stage, there is no better feeling.

In the same way that I'm open when I speak, I'm that open on stage. I feed off the energy of the audience, too, so they're feeling what I'm feeling.

I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.

The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.

I love playing the Hard Rocks; they've got a great stage, great lighting, great sound, and not so humongous; its more intimate, so we love playing theaters and clubs where the audience has a really good chance to see and hear the group and where the acoustics are good. I like it when we can hear what we're doing.

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.

Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.

Once I'm on stage, the energy of the crowd wipes my nerves away.

In Torch Song, I did that character almost non-stop from 1978 until I made the movie in 1987. Then I had some failure, which also colors how you react to doing other things.

No acting, no production, could take the place of that moment when you come out in the dark on to the stage and the drummer plays four beats on the hi-hat and then lights and music. It just takes your breath away. No words can do what music can.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action.

I have no experience performing that music live in front of an audience. So that remains to be seen. I'm very excited to see what that's going to be like.

There's a romance and power to live theater.

I'm not trying to take anything away from film acting, because it's also really hard, and I worship the people who are great at it. But to actually have to go out on stage night after night and do it with your audience right there is so wild and scary and exciting and fun and all the things that I remember loving about it.

I love the power of theater. I think it's an experience you never forget.

There's nothing better than renting a small, 50-seat theater in L.A. and just getting up there.

It's astounding how challenging plays are... The scary part is that you get to encounter humanity in a way you don't in films. The audience amplifies the experience.

Having an audience in the studio makes you perform rather than just act.

I've always been obsessed with being on stage and putting shows together.

You can't manufacture the feeling of being in a small crowd and connecting on every single level to the very last person in the very last row in the back. I think when you evolve into a headlining act and things get bigger, the intimacy and some of that energy gets lost a little bit.

If it's a 50-seat theater, I am neurotic about whether I'm doing an honest performance. Sometimes I walk away happy enough with it. You know, it can always be better, but sometimes I'll walk away distraught, feeling like I missed the pulse of the character that evening.