Quotes About Play

I could play a cop, I could play a crook, I could play a lawyer, I could play a dentist, I could play an art critic-I could play the guy next door. I am the guy next door. I could play Catholic, Jewish, Protestant. As a matter of fact, when I did The Odd Couple, I would do it a different way each night. On Monday I'd be Jewish, Tuesday Italian, Wednesday Irish-German-and I would mix them up. I did that to amuse myself, and it always worked.

[on playing Walter] It was wonderful to be able to play a character who had so many colors and who was able to play comedy, to play incredibly vulnerable, which he did a lot of the time, to play the love story, and to play the relationship with the son, which is quite unusual. That's a gift to me, as an actor. It was like everything you could possibly hope for, over five years. So, I was a very lucky actor.

I like playing at public schools. I like when there's more of a diverse audience. I'll play wherever people want to hear my music, and I'll be glad and grateful for the opportunity, but I'd rather not play for a bunch of white privileged kids. I'm not meaning that in a disrespectful way; you go where people want to hear your music. So if that's where people want to hear me play, I'm glad to play for them. But I'd rather play for an audience where half of them were not into it than one where all of them were pretending to be into it, for fear of being uncultured.

Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.

Every time a player goes out to ply his trade he's got to play from the ground up - from the soles of his feet right up to his head. Every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their heads. That's O.K. You've got to be smart to be Number One in any business. But more important, you've got to play with you heart - with every fiber of your body. If you're lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he's never going to come off the field second.

You gotta be the right size, height, speed - all those are a big factor in what position you play. If you love the game, play the position you love. Some positions get paid more, but at the end of the day you gotta play the game you love.

Macbeth is a very popular play with audiences. If you want to sell out a theater, just mount a production of Macbeth. It's a short play, it's an exciting play, it's easy to understand, and it attracts great acting.

I think I play tennis for, to against a big legend, big court, short time. That's what I train for. That's why every day I wake up and I wish I could play those matches, you know. It's like, for me it's the best thing can happen is to play against that guy on that stage, you know.

The old paradigm was pay to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You've got to be willing to play to play.

If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called do or die.

Number three, we're going to play very smart and we're not going to beat ourselves. If the other team is better than us and they just out execute us and play better then we can live with that, but we're going to play smart and give ourselves every opportunity to win the game.

In and of itself, sports may be trivial, but as a symbol of the American way of life, it has enormous weight. We are seen, worldwide, as an enormously competitive, enthusiastic people who work as hard as we play and play as hard as we work. When baseball - which has traditionally canceled one day of games for huge national celebrations or disasters - stops play for six days, that has reverberations in the national consciousness.

Buzzing at the Sill is from a Theodore Roethke poem called "In a Dark Time." I'd heard a small part of it in a play, a sort of sci-fi play about morality in a virtual reality universe. Nothing to do with the book precisely, but it was a great play.

If you play an instrument, it makes you a better singer. The more you play, the better you sing, the more you sing, the better you play.

In the christian view, the ultimate evidence for the existence of God is Jesus Christ. If there is a God, we characters in his play have to hope that he put some information about himself in the play. But Christians believe he did more than give us information. He wrote himself into the play as the main character in history, when Jesus was born in a manger and rose from the dead.

I produced a play in New York that got nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best American Play.The play is called Stalking The Bogeyman. It was a story on This American Life, and my former roommate is the artistic director of the New York Repertory Theater. He heard the NPR show, contacted them, and essentially - shortest synopsis ever, like I'm the Cablevision guide button - it's the true story of a man stalking and plotting to kill the man who raped him when he was seven. It's by a brilliant reporter named David Holthouse.

I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel.

As I've gotten older, the parts have diminished. I liked it when I was younger, I could always play the lead in the movie and I could do all the romantic scenes with the women, and it was fun and I liked to play that. Now, I'm older and I'm reduced to playing the backstage doorman or the uncle or something. I don't really love that so occasionally, when a part comes up, I'll play it.

The longer you play, the more you realize that you can't lose focus for one play or two plays or an entire drive. Those things are the difference between wins and losses. You have to figure out how to refocus after a bad play or how to stay focused when you're up in a game. Those are things you learn from experience in playing this position. I've learned a ton of ways and have different triggers for how to regain my focus if I've lost it.

My work is play. And I play when I design. I even looked it up in the dictionary, to make sure that I actually do that, and the definition of “play,” number one, was “engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor,” and number two was “gambling.” And I realize I do both when I’m designing.

The approach to acting is always the same, you try to figure who the guy is and then you try to transition your way into his way of thinking and moving through the world. The rest of it is just accoutrements, you don't play the makeup, you play the guy. If you're not wearing makeup, you just play the guy.

When I was a kid, I felt like I could do anything and play anything. I just felt super-confident. And then, once I started to play music professionally, maybe it's from being from a small town, but you grow up and then you're suddenly a big fish in a small pond, and I realized that there were a billion other drummers out there that could play as good as you or better, and everybody wants that job.

Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Challenge me. Treat me like a game of checkers and play me. That's all I'm asking, just play me. Treat me like Sega and play me.

We don't play slow and we don't play fast, we play half fast

I can make music, but I can't play it. I read somewhere that Grieg couldn't play his A-minor piano concerts very well, but he could write. My role was to compose things, but not really play it.

If the play works in an emotional and engaging way purely from what's on the page, then what's on the stage will be the icing on the cake. If the play didn't work as a play on its own terms, none of the magic, none of the special effects or theatricality of it all, would add up to anything.

When I first met Benny Goodman he wouldn't talk about anything but clarinets, mouthpieces, reeds, etc. When I tried to change the subject, he said 'But that's what we have in common. We both play clarinet.' I said, 'No, Benny, that's where we're different. You play clarinet, I play music.'

I don't really know how to play drums, so I play them wrong. But the pro guys, they never sweat. You know if someone's gone to music school, because they don't sweat when they play drums if they have.

I was very pleased that the positive things about me and my game outshone the aggressive style of play I use. I would never tone that down, because I believe in that style of play, and I believe that you can play rough on the court and still be a good sport.

You have to control what you can control, not the entire game, and try to play the best soccer possible and play clean and be smart and professional.

I ain't got no problem in Boston, I especially like the attention. I know that I'm one of the top guys in this game and all the attention is on me, I got a lot of people on my shoulder but I'm human. I like to go. I like to have fun. I like to do this and that but I gotta represent Boston and the Red Sox in every way that I do outside this game. ... Like I said I get paid to play baseball no [matter] where I go to play I still gotta go and perform even if I like it or not.

You understand, you do not invent stuff on this team. Guys that invent stuff will not play for me. Make the easy play

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

I tried to play bass in a punk band once, and it was an absolute disaster. I can’t play anything. I don’t know what it is.

It's a risk-reward thing. If I do go out and try and play and get hurt again, then I'm definitely out. I've got no chance to go. If I'm ready, then great. It's getting better. I've been doing a lot more in the last couple of days. I've got a day off (on Wednesday) and then hope to come back in on Thursday and really see where I am at and test it out. Hopefully I'm going to play this weekend but, in reality, we'll see.

In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.

I always play more than I talk, so the more I talk, the more I'll play.

I really didn't have a plan, I just went in and started playing. one of my specialties was to be able to play for a really long time without stopping and I would play these repeated patterns for hours and hours and I wouldn't seem to get tired.

I met the guys at HeavyRoc through the drummer in St. Lucia, Nick Brown. He is Ben from The Knocks' cousin, and at the time we'd been doing some work together, but everything was still very much in the unsure developmental phase (even though I'd been in it for a year and a half). I told him that if he was going to play the music for anyone that he shouldn't say anything about it and should just play it and see if anyone says anything, and he did it one day at their studio and they loved it and got it touch.

I started to play noise on my cello because I felt a deep personal connection to it. I mean, I still love all the beautiful sounds of the cello as much as anybody but it's only when I play certain sounds I know that the cello really presents who I am; not my emotions but who I am as a person.

Sport for me is about inspiring kids. Here's the rules, here's the play area, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. This is all about teaching kids how to approach life. If we're not playing sport to benefit kids, I'm not really sure why we play sport.

As long as people want to hear me play and as long as I'm able to play, then I will. I enjoy playing and performing. If I wasn't doing that, what else would I do?

Maturity - among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.

People say that they wouldn't pay to watch me play, but even I wouldn't pay to watch him play!

I used to play drums when I was a kid, play the trombone.

When I took drum lessons as a kid the teacher would always ask me if I practiced, and I'd be like 'nope' and he'd be like: "Well you're not going to be able to play the beat." So I would ask him to show me, and he'd show me and I'd be able to hear it and play it, so I've always not really been good at reading things.