Liberace Quotes

When I'm gigging, there's an uneasy shift when I pull a puppet out. People look at me aghast and I feel I have about 20 seconds to win them over. You even get the prejudice among other people in your own profession.

If you can handle a nightclub audience successfully, you can handle anything.

I still do lots of gigs where I'm the support act and people are chatting through my set, but I've got better at grabbing attention. I mean, my parents would play on bills with people like Judas Priest and get booed all the way through. But they stuck it out, got tough.

I think a lot of people mistake my confidence on stage for cockiness in real life, and that's actually farthest from the truth. When I'm on stage, I'm that confident and that cocky because I have a microphone in my hand, and there's a few thousand people staring at me. And I know they're there to laugh.

But, when you have to resort to turntables, trick lights, flashing lights, fire and all that, you're actually saying, I need this because what I do is not all that together.

I can bring a crowd down. There should be a contest for that.

Performing 60,000 people, that's easy. The energy's already there. They're already doing most of the work. All you gotta do is not forget the words - and feed them energy, too.

Stand up is the most stressful, and hosting and presenting a show has its own stresses, because you've got an audience which you've got to entertain as well as an audience at home.

It is exhilarating and dangerous to perform live. You are walking a tight rope in front of hundreds of people: anything could happen on stage, and whatever does, you must find a way to make it work.

An hour show panics me a lot less than five minutes at the O2. How do you put yourself across and make sure people have a good time in five minutes?

I like to watch actors while they are acting, how they hold their attention when so many people around are there to distract them. It's difficult.

They have barricades at our gigs - to keep people in. We do most of the songs from 'Scrubs' over 55 minutes.

What I love about the theater is that you know who you're acting for: your audience. And the thing I find really hard in film is, you don't. The audience is invisible. And we're sitting there, hoping there's other people out there.

If you get to be a really big headliner, you have to be prepared for people throwing bottles at you in the night.

Any chance I had to get in front of people - amateur talent contests at movie houses like the Broadway, the president - I took.

I feel like you've gotta be able to get up every night in front of a live audience. Whether it's 10 people or 50 people or a hundred people, whether you're in a rock band or doing the comedy circuit.

Why would you get up there and bore people? I never have figured that out. These people are supposedly in the entertainment industry, and they finally get up there to that podium and they become the most boring people in the world.

I don't know if there's a strategy really so much as, like I learned doing standup and had to learn fast, you always just try to give your favorite, strongest stuff as early as possible and you start with what you like the most.

Performing onstage is all about reacting in a grand way. You're playing an arena of seventeen or eighteen thousand people and it's your job to make sure the person at the back feels as cool as the person all the way in the front. Being on stage is a bit of a façade. You get to walk out there and be the coolest version of yourself that you could possibly have imagined and then you come off stage and you're just like everyone else.

When I'm on stage, and when I'm comfortable or uncomfortable, I have sort of a knee-jerk reaction to try to make people laugh. It's my version of a handshake to show that I want to make a connection and to show what I'm truly like. It's kind of my statement like, "This is what I'm really like. I'd like you to love me."

I tend to have a cup of tea, try to stop worrying about what I did wrong, cool down and will the audience back in as soon as possible.

I always feel like if someone has stage fright, I really try and say, "Listen, these people want you to succeed, they want to have a good evening. They want to see something really great. They don't want to see something crappy. They don't. They want to be at something really special."

Perform as many times as you can in front of people you don't know.

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.

It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.