Alice Ripley Quotes

Stand-up, I find it really difficult. It's not really my thing.

You never know how you're going to be received, after all this time. The initial response we had was just overwhelming, particularly that tour of the States.

Usually when I am in a movie that is about to come out, if people don't love it, that is fine - I can handle it.

I never wanted to be road comic.

Usually, there's nothing being thrown toward the stage or at me. Then I feel pretty good about it.

There's some anxiety the 30 minutes before the show starts. But once you step on stage and face the people, everything goes away, and you have fun and enjoy the audience.

I liked being on stage; I just didn't like the theatrical aspect of being in front of people.

Oh, I try to stay as far away from karaoke as humanly possible!

I was on stage with Cyndi Lauper, and my trousers split. It seemed like she was going to sing for ever.

I don't necessarily want to make people stomp and clap. I simply want to engage people.

I don't really do stand-up.

Most open-mic experiences I had were okay.

I love performing in front of a live audience and just stepping out in front of ruddy Royal Albert Hall is just something, I can't describe it.

I'm always going to need to play in front of people.

I once got chased off stage by a heavy-metal band.

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.

The stage is like a cage of light. People are no longer afraid of you - they are the ones out there in the dark, watching.

The first time that I appeared on stage, it scared me to death. I really didn't know what all the yelling was about. I didn't realize that my body was moving. It's a natural thing to me. So to the manager backstage I said, "What'd I do? What'd I do?" And he said, "Whatever it is, go back and do it again."

I got on stage and I went, "Oh wow. No stage fright." I couldn't do public speaking, and I couldn't play the piano in front of people, but I could act. I found that being on stage, I felt, "This is home." I felt an immediate right thing, and the exchange between the audience and the actors on stage was so fulfilling. I just went, "That is the conversation I want to have."

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.

Sometimes I'll go out into the crowd and keep singing, but I'll get maybe seven rows out and I'm out of synch, I'm a couple seconds behind the band and then it becomes chaos.

Watching first nights, though I've seen quite a few by now, is never any better. It's a nerve-racking experience. It's not a question of whether the play goes well or badly. It's not the audience reaction, it's my reaction. I'm rather hostile toward audiences—I don't much care for large bodies of people collected together. Everyone knows that audiences vary enormously; it's a mistake to care too much about them. The thing one should be concerned with is whether the performance has expressed what one set out to express in writing the play. It sometimes does.

That's a lovely experience when you make an audience laugh. Then the nerves go away for a bit. And sometimes you do things then that you've never done before that are really funny.

I've had people come up to me, as home viewers, and tell me they were screaming at the TV, yelling at each other, yelling at the contestants.

It takes a lot of courage to be a performer.