Monologue Quotes

My musician friends could always practice what they loved doing, but I can’t go on a street corner and start reciting a monologue. Acting is very collaborative, and you always need other people with you – mainly an audience.

I prefer radio to television. Radio is a dialogue; television is a monologue. In radio, you have to interact – they put the words in your head; you build the pictures in your mind. To that extent, it is more engaging than television.

My favourite moment from the Oscars was when Brando didn’t attend and sent a Native American woman to talk about Wounded Knee. She delivered a very unpopular and lengthy monologue about the injustice for indigenous people in North America. It was one of the greatest moments in American television.

I would love the opportunity to create my own program. I feel like a TV show with a format of monologue with lots of sketches thrown in could be really fun. But you know, that may never happen. Minimally, I just want to keep making stand-up.

I read somewhere that your voice towards your children becomes their inner monologue. That was so interesting to me, and I think that pertains to ‘Better Things’ as well.

I learned the biggest lesson just watching Ed McMahon, watching him watch Mr. Carson’s monologue.

The beats are like scripts, and the raps are my monologue.

I talk to myself. It’s my worst habit. I often muse aloud, or, when people drive me crazy, I curse them aloud. I might do a ranting monologue about how pissed off I am about them, occasionally forgetting that they might still be in the room; now, that’s weird!

But inside, I’m going, ‘Oh my God, is my zipper up? Do I have a booger in my nose?’ That’s my inner monologue.

With a monologue, you can be unendingly elliptical.

My first ‘SNL’ episode was with Michael Phelps and Lil Wayne. And if you go back and watch the monologue – it was supposed to feature Barack Obama, but we couldn’t get him – it was with William Shatner. But if you watch it, Guy Fieri is sitting in the front row.

I became a dancer in self-defense. I was doing a comedy monologue and didn’t know how else to get off, so I danced off. I’ve been dancing ever since, but I’m still a comedian.

I teach voice, and I teach pretty much just, like, whatever people need. So if they want me to work on a monologue with them, or if they want me to do some work with them, I do that. And then I do master classes, like at high schools – which is my most favorite thing to do.

My thing is, I like playing guys who have a really interesting internal monologue.

Often, when people don’t do so well in a monologue at UCB, it’s because they’re racking their brain so hard to be funny that they’re just not honest and don’t just tell a true story, which is what we want.

I was emotional. I wanted to be taken seriously. I was pretty emo. I was reciting Shakespeare monologues when I was 10. I still know the whole ‘To be, or not to be…’ monologue, because I knew it when I was 10.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

I write for a radio show that, no matter what, will go on the air Saturday at five o’clock central time. You learn to write toward that deadline, to let the adrenaline pick you up on Friday morning and carry you through, to cook up a monologue about Lake Wobegon and get to the theater on time.

Since I’d developed this fear of not remembering my lines, I took ‘Mulholland Drive’ as a test for myself. It was a long monologue: no one else speaks.

People really have come for a dialogue when they go to a stand-up show in the U.K. They say, ‘I understand that you have now finished your little comedy monologue; now I have something to say regarding what I’ve just heard.

Comedy clubs sharpen a comic, they’re like the gym for us, making us stronger, faster, funnier. Without them every comedy show would feel like a monologue.

When self-doubt creeps in, don’t ignore it – address it. Respond to harsh self-criticism with something more compassionate. Talk to yourself like a trusted friend and refuse to believe your unrealistic, negative inner monologue.

Even with my family, I feel sort of ‘other.’ I’m the only one of my siblings who wasn’t born in Jamaica. For a long time, I didn’t feel very connected to Jamaican culture, but because I was raised so heavily with that cultural influence, I realized that my inner monologue is a Jamaican woman.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

Training is vital. You need to know the technical aspects of acting, just in case someone hands you a monologue and simply says, ‘Cry here and laugh here.’ You have to be able to make sense of it all.

I don’t know of any actor in any television show that I have ever seen who’s given monologue after monologue in a television series.

For anyone who can only handle about 12-minutes-per-day of anything news related before needing to retreat into isolation, allow me to recommend spending those 12 minutes listening to the opening monologue of ‘The Rush Limbaugh Show.’

I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions.

No one but John Oliver is going to be able to figure out the code of making a 20-minute monologue on futures, securities, and currency speculation interesting, funny, and poignant politically.

The best part is, I can speak Hindi fluently. Earlier, I would cringe at the idea of delivering even a one-line dialogue in the language, but now, I can mouth a five-page monologue without blinking. My diction has improved, which has enhanced my performance.

The monologue is an interesting space for an actor.

I think that connection with humans is so important. Sometimes I’ll do this monologue and talk to the crowd, like, ‘Come on, let’s really connect here.’ I don’t think a lot of people understand it’s a two-way exchange. Some people go to a show and are like, ‘Yeah, you make me feel.’ That’s not how it works.

But I really like our experimental, performance and monologue videos, where there’s barely jokes in the video, where it’s almost a joke in itself that the monologue is even being recorded.

The young man who’s had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life – he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he’s never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn’t walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn’t have a dream of doing well.

Whether it’s writing a monologue or writing standup or writing a screenplay or writing a play, I think staying involved in the creation of your own work empowers you in a way, even if you don’t ever do it. It gives you a sense of ownership and a sense of purpose, which I think as an actor is really important.

When I was about six or seven, I did this character reenactment performance where I read a monologue from ‘Peter Pan.’ I got into a complete Peter Pan outfit and did a little paragraph from the script – and I ended up winning an award for it.

Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter – itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self – and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet.

I was a shy little kid, and getting up in front of people and making them laugh and being able to carry on a dialogue rather than a monologue was something that was pretty interesting to me because you could set yourself up – you could ask a question and then answer it.

The writer crafts their ideal world. In my world, everyone has really long conversations or just picks apart pop culture to death and everyone talks in monologue.

My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington’s story of her relationship with Truman.