Tom Lehrer Quotes

There are but few talents requisite to become a popular preacher; for the people are easily pleased if they perceive any endeavors in the orator to please them. The meanest qualifications will work this effect if the preacher sincerely sets about it.

I think nobody wants to hear a sermon. Well, some people do, but maybe not through music or not with me. No one wants to hear me give a speech that way.

I really like performing for people.

When I was 3, I recited a poem at a festival in Passaic, New Jersey. The applause was tremendous, and it hit me that I could affect people positively by performing.

Despite all the technical improvements, it still boils down to a man or a woman and a microphone, playing music, sharing stories, talking about issues - communicating with an audience.

I really enjoy doing the live stuff.

My greatest satisfaction in acting on television is to have the opportunity to communicate with the world.

I love performing in front of people, no matter where they come from or what language they speak.

And I began to tell little anecdotes that had happened to me, and people would laugh. And I began to like that, you know. But I knew that, 'cause I'd do that in school, but I wouldn't do it out there in front of all them people.

I'm motivated by entertaining people.

I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.

Every time I get in front of an audience, I do the best I can. I really don't look at it like, you know, 'This is gonna be this crowd, or that crowd.' If anything, I think about the demographics only because of what songs will entertain more than others.

I don't know what else I would do. I love entertaining people, I love communicating, I love an audience. I'm a real artist, right from the bottom of my toes to the top of my head.

It takes both courage and talent to stand up in front of fellow human beings and make them crack a smile, and at the same time keep it clean.

Ever since I was 2 or 3, I loved to perform for people. I would walk up to another table in a restaurant and crack a joke, sing a song, do a dance, or something entertaining, and the 'audience' would almost always smile and laugh.

I really, really love what I do, and there's nothing I love more than getting on stage and playing for an audience or working on a part, getting in front of the camera, and meeting all the cool people I get to meet, and going all the cool places I get to go.

It's really fun to be on stage in front of people.

I love performing for the crowd. Maybe that's what it is. I'm a crowd pleaser.

As a comic, you are trying to please people in some way - to make them laugh.

I'm not nervous coming back to my old audience. I'm looking forward to it. That's really what I do; that's my day job.

There were people that grabbed you just by talking, and that's what I loved about professional wrestling when I started out. That's why I'm already so good. That's why people literally hang on the edge of their seats when I have a mic because they want to know what I'm going to say.

I like to perform in front of an audience.

I definitely enjoy an audience, when I'm performing. As I get older I'm kind of less comfortable at being demonstrative. I always fancied myself as a raconteur, but that never really worked out.

I like entertaining people. I like being on stage. I like being in the life. This is what I do. This is the only thing I know how to do besides rob people and fight. Even when I was robbing people, I was entertaining them. But that's just what I love doing.

I look at an audience kind of like meeting my in-laws for the first time. You want to be yourself, but you still want to be somebody that they like. When I go on the stage each night, I try my best to outguess my audience.