David Hare Quotes

Confronting a stadium audience, you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.

But I also know in standup, there's nowhere to hide. You get on stage and you deliver, or you are eviscerated and you are thrown into a pile of bodies at the bottom of a mountain.

When I perform onstage, I'm actually kind of nearsighted, so I don't have any real, true understanding of what the audience is like.

Before I go on stage I pretend that everyone loves me.

At school, people would say I should go on 'Britain's Got Talent,' but I would never have done that because it doesn't seem genuine; it doesn't feel natural.

It's quite pretentious, really, isn't it? The notion the audience is going to be interested in you for an hour and a half. Think too much about that and anxiety takes over.

I think the challenge is going out in front of a paying audience with absolutely nothing and trying to entertain them for two hours. Thankfully, I only think about that right before we go on, and then once we're out there, everything's fine.

There is nothing like the high of being on stage and reaping applause, especially for emotionally needy people like me!

I don't really think about the fact that a lot of people are watching 'DSDS' or about the way I should phrase my sentences.

My acting is atrocious, to say the least. But I've found that it's not acting that people are concerned about, it's your presence.

I'm so scared of doing theater. I've got stage fright, although they keep asking me to come back.

Being on TV in front of people is a lot different than sitting in a dark room with a microphone. When I had my radio show, I was on four hours a day for 20-something years. If you put a live microphone in front of Mother Teresa for that amount of time, she'd piss somebody off.

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.

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.

Many people associate stage fright with a fear of looking ridiculous, making a bad impression. For me, it's like a kind of fever.

I'm not a natural performer. I don't like performing very much.

When I performed the songs in front of an audience at the end of each project and I knew the storytellers were in the crowd listening, that was hard.

When school friends would think about appearing on stage as the most frightening, the most awful, intimidating experience ever, I knew that it was something I could do.

Onstage, of course, you have the luxury of rehearsal and discovery and time and comfort, which then turns into terror when you actually have to put it in front of people.

I'd go onstage doing this thing, trying to fill this arena that I can't fill because I don't understand what this is. It's like you're given a job that's beyond you. And it's taken me years to realize what works in those big situations.

I'm much more comfortable and confident running out on the field in front of 70,000 people instead of standing in front of a camera trying to say some lines.

It's hard for a person to try to keep his stuff together being nominated for something and then performing onstage.

I wasn't comfortable on stage for years. It was good - 18 shows. I want to do it again.

I go on stage, it's like I'm leading you into battle; you are not all going to be here at the end.

I never had an aversion because I was active in the drama club. If I had that aversion I certainly wouldn't put myself in the position of being on stage. Of course, in the drama club you're hiding behind a character.