Stone Cold Steve Austin Quotes

It's show business. No show, no business.

You get way better from playing to the passing public. You learn how to entertain. But it took me a good three years out on the promenade to figure that out. You also learn what makes them stop dead in their tracks and what doesn't.

At The Verve's first-ever gig, I said that we were gonna blow this local band off the stage. It was only in the local Wigan paper, and they rang me to ask why I was being so aggressive. I just went, 'Hey man, it's like boxing. I'm just trying to sell a ticket.'

A promoter needs to be in the e-commerce ticketing business. In a fundamental sense the promoter's job is to buy a show and go and market and sell the tickets.

There's nothing more vulnerable than just standing in front of a thousand people, or ten thousand people, and doing your best to entertain them, touch them in some way.

I love being onstage, I love the relationship with the audience.

I'm very active on Twitter and Instagram. I'm always posting pictures from set, and little clues and teasing people with fun things. It's awesome!

When I'm speaking in front of 15 and 20,000 people and I'm up there using a lot of motion, I guess in it's own way, it's a pretty healthy act. I really enjoy doing it. A lot of times these rooms are very hot, like saunas, and I guess that is a form of exercise and, you know?

Why would you get up there and bore people? I never have figured that out. These people are supposedly in the entertainment industry, and they finally get up there to that podium and they become the most boring people in the world.

I do miss the people in the audience and the fun: "I came with my mother! And this is my mother!" I miss that. I miss: "My cousin and I came all the way from...." I miss that. I don't miss this - who is left to interview?

Being onstage and performing, the high of that, and people coming to see you, and getting to make them laugh - that's what gets me hyped up. It's a nervous excitement.

Once you make something that people enjoy then you are forced to promote it. Instead of just going right into the next project, you have to be where they need you to be and do what they need you to do.

In the old days, that was my ad-lib for hecklers in the joints I worked. It stuck with me. I hardly say it now, say, to fans, even though people do send me hockey pucks.

When I'm doing stand-up, it's just me depending on me. I know how to go out there and make people laugh. I've been doing it since I was a teenager. I trust my instincts. I just go out and talk. A lot of the time I let the material come from the top of my head.

Whether it's five people or 50,000 people, I always love to perform and feel very blessed that I'm able to do that.

I think you can talk about anything if the context is correctly arranged. If you set up the context and you bring the audience along carefully enough with you, you can get them to cross the line with you. What I try to do is talk about things that bother me, and I hope that in doing so I bother other people.

I'm always a little leery about doing shows where I'm not the headliner because when I first started playing in 1982 I opened for Missing Persons and got pelted for 45 minutes. After that, I made the decision to headline no matter what, even if I was playing to seven people. I wanted people to be there to see me.

When I'm on stage, and when I'm comfortable or uncomfortable, I have sort of a knee-jerk reaction to try to make people laugh. It's my version of a handshake to show that I want to make a connection and to show what I'm truly like. It's kind of my statement like, "This is what I'm really like. I'd like you to love me."

I'm friends with a lot of writers and so many of them say how much they hate signings and how they leave after a certain period of time. But what is so hard about sitting there while people tell you how much they love you? And if you don't like it, well, learn to like it. I try to take one person at a time. I never look down the line to see how many more people are left. And I always try to make people talk about something besides whatever they planned to say.

Interviewing people, I don't miss that at all. I do miss kibitzing with the audience because after every show I would spend half an hour to 40 minutes talking to people.

don't perspire while conducting - only the audience should get warm.

It's not vanity, because if you look weird, it will distract from what your trying to do. If you look as good as you can, people will be able to pay attention to what your actually saying.

Speaking for myself, I try to go out there on the stage and make jokes with people, so I'm not really thinking about the impact anything I have. If it does resonate with people, that's really great.

I [give] maybe the long-winded speeches that not everybody reads, but I can also do a slow jam on Jimmy Fallon better than most.

I'm still doing me. I try to come up with different concept for my shows, you gotta keep the people interested, but I'm still me.