Tommy Lee Quotes

The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks.

I like a performance, a live performance, so I like little mistakes because that's what makes perfect - the mistakes.

Hopefully I'm bringing to rock n' roll the kind of spontaneity that I love, and always believed rock and roll stands for.

I don't like knowing what the next song is because that's what I'd think about during the number we're playing.

The thing a drama school can't give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can't be taught, and you have to have intuition. It's an essential ingredient.

Most actors spend a lot of time training themselves to be an actor. And I kind of didn't do that. I just started doin' it in front of an audience and had to deliver.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

Sometimes I know a joke I'm going to yell out ahead of time, but most of the time it's stream of conscious. You never really know it until you've got everyone dressed up, the set is built, all the extras are here.

Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.

Movies have takes. But plays are like life - you don't really get takes.

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

I'm very unpredictable, but at the end of the day, I'm working. Sometimes things change in my life. It's like, 'Hold up - that ain't feel good. That felt good.' And that's how I look at anything I do.

Some people only work to recorded music because it's so reliable and exactly the same every time, which is exactly why I don't.

Doing a musical is like having a kid. It's out there alive somewhere. It's not like a movie or a TV show where what we intended is what everyone will see. The kid can act out. The kid's going to do what it wants to do.

I started in live television and I've done a lot of live TV and that's really the thing that I love best. I love flying by the seat of my pants.

The best actors just stay in the moment, and whatever happens in the scene is a genuine surprise. You really do not know what's going to happen next. But living that out in life is very dangerous because it throws you into a place where you don't know if you're going to survive.

I love the you-never-know-what's-going-to-happen aspect of doing concerts.

You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis.

It's so liberating to play a song in front of 50,000 people that you've never played before. Not something you played a long time ago and have forgotten: Never. Played. Before. There's something magical about it.

I prefer doing TV, where it can be different every time.

I love the stage - the fact that you only have one take to get it right, the interaction with the audience, and how every show is different even though you're doing the same thing.

I just get onstage and sing. I don't think about how I'm going to do it - it's too complicated.

I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.

The first tour an artist does is a strange one... because you can never tell how the audience is going to react.

A magic show and a concert are very similar in the way I like keeping things a mystery and not doing them the same way every time. The listener and the audience never know what's going to happen next.