James Acaster Quotes

On stage, you have to have incredible confidence, or you would stop doing it. But I don't think I will ever get to the point where I go, 'I know exactly what I am doing,' and I don't think I want to.

To me, I don't feel like a dancer. I feel like an idiot trying to be a dancer.

No, I'm never confident with what I do, particularly playing and singing!

I get to do my own thing with music. I get to write the songs and sing the songs. As an actor, you have to do what someone else tells you to do and say someone else's words. And you're limited by the way you look and music is just more rewarding creatively for me.

And what makes Bob Dylan stories interesting is that the only person who can decide their outcome is Bob Dylan, so you never know how they're going to go.

I can't really explain the feeling of acting. It makes you the most insecure you can possibly be.

I know now that everybody in the arts is forever a beginner. Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Every night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.

It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.

I struggle quite a lot in rehearsals, partly because I'm shy, partly because I still don't really understand the work that actors and directors do. I love the magic at the end, but the getting there - the wrong turns that are necessary to make something work - I find slightly beguiling and worrying.

I'm not here to put my music out on the Internet with no support and then say I got creative freedom. I've got creative freedom wherever I go: I don't create anything that I don't want to create. That's freedom. Since when does a company force you to make something that you don't want to make? If they do that, you leave.

I always say I want creative control. A lot of people don't think about that. And that's what every artist should think of - being creative and not just a puppet.

I can only control what I can, which is what I'm able to do as an artist.

I was on 'AGT,' and I was like, 'Well, face it Darci, you are just going to probably get out on the first live round.'

I'm not the kind of person who ever thought, 'Oh, a one-woman show - bring it on!'

The reason I decided to become a solo artist in the first place was because I always felt that the results that I got from working as a team where everyone had equal say... ended up with compromised, watered-down results.

I can't say I'm confident in my abilities as an actor.

Cabaret presents different challenges, as it is all on me. I love having the freedom to say anything you want - do anything you want. It is a lot of responsibility, and if it works, you get all the kudos, and if not - all the blame.

I'm not Beyonce or Trey Songz or anything, so every now and again, I feel a little like, 'Are they listening to me, or am I just sounding crazy singing to myself?' I feel like that sometimes.

When I first started acting, I was genuinely questioning whether or not I should be doing this.

It wasn't slung together by a producer and a publisher. We decided we were going to take hold of our music and let it evolve organically.

I can make any film I want to make.

I'm 100 percent in control of my artistry, music, and finances.

I had heard a live show, where my voice didn't sound the way I wanted to hear it and I got paranoid. I'm not an amazing singer, I just belt it out in this crappy old way, but for a while I had it in my head that I couldn't sing.

I've never been one to want to be the center of attention and be put up on stages every night. That's just not really my personality. I'm comfortable with it now, but my real passion is being creative.

I always imitated other people and thought, 'Well, maybe I'll do standup,' but I was too afraid for that.