If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.

'Funny People' is my favorite performance of myself to date. Even though it's a comedy and there are serious moments I really felt like Leo felt like a real person. It didn't feel like I was playing myself. Whether it's a comedy or drama I just try to make it as realistic as possible.

My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free it was 1972 with the exception of two little one-shot one-song things. But that's just for friends out of friendship for the people involved and also because it was fun.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

If it's total freedom I guess the ultimate thing you can go into is total silence between the audience and performer with the performer projecting something he doesn't even have to play.

Institutions - government churches industries and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom and in so far as they fail on the whole to perform this function they are wrong and need reconstruction.

The road to freedom lies not through mysteries or occult performances but through the intelligent use of natural forces and laws.

There is no reasoning no process of inference or comparison there is no thinking about things no putting two and two together there are no ideas - the animal does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform.

I tell my students it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see who's very far away who's a different color who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

We are involved in youth testing internationally. We want to try to prove without a shadow of a doubt the relationship between physical fitness and health not just physical fitness and ability to perform.

I have now taken a serious task upon myself and I fear a greater one that is in the power of any man to perform in the given time-but it is too late to go back.

If you have stage fright it never goes away. But then I wonder: is the key to that magical performance because of the fear?

I guess some people want to be performers because they want to be famous.

When I was in fourth grade... this wonderful teacher said you didn't have to write a book report you could just talk about the book you could do a drawing of the book you could write a play inspired by the book and that's what I did. I got to be so famous. I had to go around to every school and perform it. It was just so natural and fun.

I've wanted to perform my entire life. I found a paper I wrote in kindergarten class about what I wanted to be when I grew up - and I wrote 'a famous singer!'

In opera as with any performing art to be in great demand and to command high fees you must be good of course but you must also be famous. The two are different things.

I know I had my equivalents in Adrian Lester and Lenny James when I was at drama school. I remember David Harewood doing 'Othello' at the National and Adrian Lester having done Cheek by Jowl's famous 'As You Like It and Company' at the Donmar. Not necessarily performances I saw but just the fact they happened was massively encouraging.

I was a shy kid but somehow I knew I would make it as a performer. I'd always be telling my mum that I was going to be a famous singer. In my school yearbooks I would write 'Remember me when I'm famous.' I knew I had a gift.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

Touring is tough. You're almost in a haze because you don't really know where you are half the time: You're in a hotel room one moment and the next thing you know you're onstage performing for 60 000 people then you're back on an airplane. It's very hectic and I couldn't do it without my family.

When I heard the royal family wanted to have me perform in celebration of Prince William's marriage I knew I had to give them a little something. 'Wet' is the perfect anthem for Prince William or any playa to get the club smokin'.

Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies and I had played a little at school and at camp. My parents would drag me out to perform for my family like all parents do but it was a hobby - nothing more.

The United States have fulfilled in good faith all their treaty stipulations with the Indian tribes and have in every other instance insisted upon a like performance of their obligations.

Over the years my mother's steadfast faith in God has inspired me particularly when I had to perform extremely difficult surgical procedures or when I found myself faced with my own medical scare.