Sarah Silverman Quotes

The first time onstage, a light went on. 'OK, this is my thing. I'm comfortable here. This is my thing.'

I can't believe how much time has passed. The first time I did stand-up I was 17, and I was really a stand-up once I was 19 in New York, and now I'm 41, and I still feel like I haven't found myself onstage.

Through every moment on stage for the first time, I felt like I was finally right where I belonged.

The first time I ever did a play, in junior high school, I said to myself, 'Hey, people like me doing this. I'm making them laugh.'

I was brought up in a house full of women; the first time I realised no one was interrupting me was when I was on stage - that's probably the subconscious reason I became an actor.

Drag was not only my introduction to womanhood, but my introduction to entertainment. It was the first time I realized that I could move a crowd.

When I first started comedy, before I kind of gained any national prominence, I - in a weird way - went back to that. Marc Maron had me on WTF making fun of me about that when I first opened for him. I had this very kind of hip-hop bravado to me, and I realized that now I've let some of that go in my stage presence, that maybe that was because I had dropped that completely from my life, and when I got onstage I sort of rekindled it. And I think now that it was perhaps a defense mechanism that was left over from those days, which I think is kind of interesting.

When I was in third grade I taught myself ventriloquism... What's hard is to learn to be an entertainer and make people laugh. I was a few years out of college before I felt I had enough material. Then in 1988 I moved to L.A. and started to do some shows at comedy clubs.

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

Playing characters allows me to do things I may not always do, while singing in concerts allows me to really find my own voice and grow.

I don't have the genetic make up of a frontman, but I'm learning how to do it.

In my stand up, I think I try to be less energetic because I feel embarrassed about how much enthusiasm I have. There's something about acting like I don't care, or if I act like I haven't spent enough time on it, it seems to go better. If I act like I'm really trying to sell it, it doesn't go as well.

It was the first time I traveled alone, but I was not scared.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

For me, 'Rent' was all about coming out of myself, finding out who I was, learning the power I could have as a performer.

Through theater and acting school, I found a way to articulate myself.

I'm one Pia Zadora, the same way all the time. That's why I'm happy. It took me a long time to get to the point where could be myself all the time.

Not everyone can be as successful a performer as myself, who gave 10 great performances the first time I ever did comedy, and then toiled in obscurity for years.

I'm always thinking about identity. And the middle-school years are a time of exploring questions about who you are and who you want to be. For the first time, you see the world in a broader sense.

For a long time, because I'm pretty tall, I was scared to wear heels, but now I wear them all the time. I feel like I'm still discovering my stage style, but I love - well, I'm not a huge color person onstage, but I am in real life. I like short stuff, big heels, fringe, lots of fringe, sometimes sparkle, yeah!

I love acting because it's empowering. It empowers me.

I kind of discovered my voice for the first time, and the more I did it, the better it got.

The first time I did stand-up was the summer I was 17.

My chutzpah was me singing to Mario Lanza. So Mario looked at me after I talk-sang 'Be My Love' for the first time; he took the lyric out of my hand as contemptuously as you can take a lyric out of someone's hand, and he sang 'Be My Love' back at me.

It took me a long time to find my voice as a singer, and I'm happy that I did.