Performance Uncertainty Quotes

You cannot buy players and know, for sure, that they can deliver. You cannot know because football is a team sport.

Comedy is a funny thing, and it's really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title. You would never go to a club just to see "Live music," you would go to a jazz club to see jazz, a blues club to see blues, etc. But when you go to see "standup comedy," if you don't know the performers material, you really don't have any idea what you're gonna get.

Our pitching could be better than I think it will be.

Never in my short career, I've never had that experience where I wasn't sure if I was acting or if it was real.

I'd get a train to some town and wander about to find a decent spot. Sometimes I'd play for three hours; sometimes I'd get moved on after three songs.

Golf is assuredly a mystifying game. It would seem that if a person has hit a golf ball correctly a thousand times, he should be able to duplicate the performance at will. But such is certainly not the case.

I always knew I could win tournaments in the U.K. but there was a question mark over whether I could deal with playing in China.

We just had to stay out-of-the-way [in Fences]. [August Wilson] already wrote a masterpiece. And you really don't know how it's going to work until you get it in front of an audience.

As an actor, you're always nervous as to what a director will do with something.

For me, before I go on stage, it all depends. Might be a girl, might be an edible, might be a verse, might be somebody mixing something in my drink without me knowing - hopefully that won't happen tonight.

As actors, we're like these vagabond artists: we have to be invited to perform, so if you don't have a choice of options, it's very hard to define yourself.

I may have given my best performance but what if the role gets edited?

People expect that you will play well and score a lot of goals, but it is not always possible.

As an actor, you think you know your craft, you know the conflicts in your character, but often you don't.

When you read a play, the words speak to you. When you read a script, there's no way you can tell if that's the way that movie will turn out.

You do your best [ on auditions] and sometimes you win 'em over and sometimes you don't.

One of the tasks that any artistic director has is, you're trying to bring elements together that will work. The truth is that you could bring all the best talents in the world together and produce a big turkey.

I can't control what the judges give me.

The weird job of acting is that it is so simple. You just see the person in the situation. It is whatever you have to do to get there. Some people want to stay up all night or cut their toe off. For me it is a bunch of reading, and hanging out with real people, I do that. You never know what you are going to get. It might be the shoes people wear.

What's unfortunate about buying a pitcher for $12 million is that he carries no warranty.

There's no guarantee of winning, even if you are the best players and the best team.

You obviously never know when you have a lot of changes to a team, but the new guys have come in here and they look great. They work hard. But the league is so competitive now so it's hard to predict.

When you do something unusual, the audience doesn't 100 percent know what you're up to in the beginning. And if you're doing a character comedy, they haven't learned the characters yet.

With physical prep work, you know if you go to the gym, you will get size. There's no chance it won't happen. The emotional prep work is a variable. You could step onto the set one day and have a disconnect with your thoughts and feelings and have a rough day acting because you can't quite tap into what you need.

I hate to admit that. I want to win every race, but I know that's not possible. To be in the top 25 is realistic if we have any luck this year. But anything to be in the chase or something like that is very unrealistic.