Ed O'Neill Quotes

That reminds me of something that happened to me when I was a kid.

When I was about six or seven, I did this character reenactment performance where I read a monologue from 'Peter Pan.' I got into a complete Peter Pan outfit and did a little paragraph from the script - and I ended up winning an award for it.

When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.

Hi. My name is Debby, and I am a storyteller. I don't think of myself as an actress. I am more like a face that takes words on a page, and puts them in front of your eyes.

I was in character all the time when I was little.

You know when you have a party as a kid, and your mom hires a fairy, princess, or superhero to come host the party? I was Fairy Lavender. I loved it. It was good training for theater.

I am something of a ham. Yeah, I'd always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn't as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords.

My dad, who is a screenwriter, showed me all these great movies. He showed me 'E.T.' when I was 2-years-old, and I just kind of progressed from there. It was also my brother. We'd always watch movies together, and he'd do these voices and he'd always want to do skits and he'd come up with stuff with me.

I'm an entertainer, period. I can write it, I can speak it, and I can act it.

WWE prepares you for so much other stuff in entertainment.

I was new to acting on a stage in a narrative as opposed to acting on a stage as a stand-up. And like everything else it's just like comfort level. The first time I did stand-up I was at a place called the B3 in New York on Third and Avenue B and I not only didn't take the mic out of the stand, but I clutched the stand of the entire time.

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.

Wrestling is a performance. Its entertainment, we [wrestlers] tell stories. We make our fans happy by telling stories but the long and short of it its pretty much the same thing as acting.

If you don't have story to tell the public at large - you have to be able to sort of go listen.

I think that story wins out over acting and that the thing as a whole is more important than the performances therein.

As a child my grandmother used to tell us stories about the dead and the mystical.

One of the things I used to dream of is that if I could just be funny like Red Skelton, if I could be a comedian like Red Skelton - that's what I watched on TV - then maybe I would have friends. I just remember that if I told stories to my friends, they listened. And in my family, with nine people talking at the same time, it's really hard to get people to listen to you. We were all craving attention.

It's one of my biggest memories of my father reading. I had pneumonia, remember, but I was a little better now, and madly caught up in the book, and one thing you know when you're ten is that, no matter what, there's gonna be a happy ending. They can sweat all they want to scare you, the authors, but back of it all you know, you just have no doubt, that in the long run justice is going to win out.

My parents read the comics to me, and I fell in love with comic strips. I've collected them all of my life. I have a complete collection of all the "Buck Rogers" Sunday funnies and daily paper strips, I have all of "Prince Valiant" put away, all of "Tarzan," which appeared in the Sunday funnies in 1932 right on up through high school. So I've learned a lot from reading comics as a child.

I'm generally not a social dramatist or comedy writer. My interests have always been more in psychological stories or personal relations and comic ideas.

I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and what your hopes and dreams were.

I got cast in a school play and I fell in love with that. I felt comfortable on stage and found out it was a brilliant way of expressing myself and I was happy and I could do it.

I want to be interesting in an interview just as much as I want to do well in a part.

I love doing the readings. The readings are the fun bits... The readings are probably the things that actually keep me going on these. If I couldn't do the readings, I wouldn't do the [signing] tours. I get to stand up there and read to a bunch of adults who in many cases nobody's read to in years, since they were about five. They just squat on the floor. That's enormously enjoyable.

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.