Bruce Dickinson Quotes

It's a different thing playing in a smaller venue where you can actually see people's faces and reactions. It's so much more intimate. You walk away with a more personal experience.

What is a good performance? It lies in the hands and head of a performer... the shortest way between two people is not a straight line.

I love the intimacy of venues like the House of Blues. When everyone is packed in and so close to you, it makes you play differently. It's so much more fun to play because there's so much more high energy in a place like that.

There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.

My live performance, it just comes from feeling an energy and emotion from the crowd.

Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you're sittin' down there with 'em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.

I prefer to play in smaller venues because I like the intimacy, the connection with the audience.

I actually always try to have a moment in my show where I can just lay down on stage and talk to people for a little while.

Playing live is closer to theatre, although when you're up there on your own, it's quite scary and revealing because you're playing your own songs. It's like a one man show that you've written yourself.

Feeling emotionally connected to a song, and accumulating every bit of the moment's energy to sing out to the audience is what I believe makes a great performer.

Acting is the most communicative thing I can imagine doing.

When you dance and move around it creates a different reaction from the audience - they love it.

I hadn't performed by myself in a while. It feels very natural to me, and I assume people come for the very same reasons as they do when I'm with the band: to be moved, for something to happen to them.

All my life I wanted to play music with love to every member of the audience.

I love intimacy, always, of performing.

It's a little like casting out hundreds of fishing lines into the audience. You start getting little bites, then more, then you hook a few, then more. Then you can start reeling them in and that's a loveliest feeling - the whole audience laughing with you.

I'm not crazy about arenas just because I can sell them out. It doesn't do anything for my ego at all. I want to play places where people don't have to sit in the nosebleed seats and wonder what the hell is going on.

There's no doubt arena shows are exciting, but you don't get that up close and personal kind of vibe, and that's what rock n' roll is all about for me.

Anything you can do to get more people to come to your live shows is good, because that's where you can really do what you do. Everyone's on the same page, and you don't have to win strangers over as much.

I like to feel the burn of the audience's eyes when I'm whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone.

When I sing, I pick out people in the audience and pinpoint on them. So if you feel that I am singing just for you, you may be right!

Immediate, simultaneous connection between the audience and a performer is crucial to me. It's why I do what I do. Other things, like recording, are satisfying, but they're not the same. I love the connection I get with the audience when I'm sitting behind that piano.

I always found that the closer I got to who I really am, on stage, the more they responded to it.

It's one thing to turn up and jump around stage and give people a good time - that's obviously a big part of this - but I'll always get deeper than that as an artist.

I love being in a small club where everybody has a good seat, and we don't look like ants. And you can feel the audience, which makes it kind of magical, and I miss that. I guess I have the best of both worlds.