Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
George Bernard ShawRead
Onstage, you just have to tell the absolute truth about the character you are playing. You hope you communicate it, and you hope it comes back like a tennis ball. If you're listening to the sound of your own voice, nobody else is. The audience knows, and they freeze on you.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Performing requires authenticity and connection with the audience.
This quote emphasizes the importance of sincerity in performance. Carol Channing suggests that when actors portray a character truthfully, they not only engage their audience effectively, but they also create a reciprocal relationship, much like a conversation, where the audience's reaction enhances the performance, bringing it to life.
Themes
PerformanceAuthenticityAudienceTruthCharacter
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote during a drama workshop to emphasize the importance of genuine acting.
Similar quotes
When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.
Patti SmithRead
French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.
Michael PollanRead
Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.
William Butler YeatsRead
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
The main thing I love about street photography is that you find the answers you don't see at the fashion shows. You find information for readers so they can visualize themselves.
Bill CunninghamRead