Top 40 Joel Grey Quotes

Theater is the most important thing in life for me.

I’m about possibilities and about surprises and the life force.

All the things you do, even the shows that don’t work, are as much work, but you learn more from the things that are difficult.

I was accepted to UCLA, but at the same time, I had a job offer at Chicago’s Chez Paree nightclub. My father, being a practical man, felt I should take the job.

It can take me forever to choose the right coffee cup in the morning. And it does make a difference!

I always wanted children, to be a dad. That was as important to me as being an actor.

You can be taking two steps forward as an actor, but if a movie doesn’t make money, you might as well be taking two steps backwards. It’s all about economics.

The fundamental job of the actor is to tell about the human condition, to be a voice for the truest ideas and deepest emotions.

My daughter, Jennifer Grey, was in ‘Dirty Dancing,’ which was shot in the Catskill Mountains, where the great old Jewish entertainers used to appear. It was the first time she’d been to the Borscht Belt, and I don’t think she’s been back since.

Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.

I had begun my professional career when I was 9 years old at the Cleveland Play House, and it was a very specific, real theater sort of like, you know, in England and the Berliner Ensemble – very devoted people. And I thought the theater was the greatest place I had ever been, and that’s what I wanted to do.

When I read a script, the important thing is that I can connect in some way with that character and have some idea from what his story is that I can tell that story too, because that’s all acting is, is storytelling.

I am concerned about the musical theater, selfishly, because I love it.

I was totally delighted, interested in, and amused by my stint on ‘Voyager.’

There’s a lot going on in the world that’s very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we’re dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.

The Yiddish language is so rich and unusual that I’ve always been hooked on its sounds, although I don’t speak it.

I thought ‘The Humans’ was a beautiful play.

I love ‘Cabaret’ and ‘George M!’ They’re both incredible as far as I’m concerned.

My dad would take me downtown, and I’d stand backstage and watch him in the vaudeville pit band. I was 6 or 7. He was a musician, a band leader, a wonderful clarinetist and saxophone player.

I spent 15 years of not being able to get a job creating a role on Broadway.

I really didn’t feel that my motion picture career was going the way I wanted it to go.

I worked with a lot of leading ladies: Bebe Neuwirth, Anne Rankin, Bernadette Peters, Liza Minnelli. They’re all phenomenal talents.

I’m always interested in the challenge of doing something new.

There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.

There’s a civility that has always been a part of me.

I was small growing up, and to make matters worse, I wore glasses, and my mother dressed me in attention-getting outfits. I was a target of bullies.

If you don’t tell the whole truth about yourself, life is a ridiculous exercise.

When my father came out on stage wearing a big cowboy hat and a shirt lettered ‘Bar Mitzvah Ranch’ to sing ‘Home on the Range’ in Yiddish, it was his way of saying, ‘I want to be an American.’

My mother named me after her favorite actor, Joel McCrea, and dressed and presented me as her avatar. I’m sure she wanted to be a performer, but when that was impossible, I was her next best shot.

For a few years, there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: ‘Chicago,’ ‘Wicked’ and ‘Anything Goes.’

I think there is a lot of loss in being a professional child actor. All of a sudden, you start to want to be an adult at the age of 8 or 9. I never did kid stuff, so to speak, so I was in many ways ostracized by the other kids. But I did get this other life, so it was a trade-off.

My father was a musician and wanted me to study piano. I had no interest.

I fell so hard for the theater. I knew it was a place where you can sort out your life.

I was already in my early twenties, but I looked much younger because I was fresh-faced and, well, short. So I did songs such as ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ and jokes such as describing current events as ‘ancient history.’ Boy, did the audience roar at that one.

The subject matter of the show, ‘Cabaret,’ was more than risky. And the emcee I would be playing didn’t have a single line of dialogue. Still, it was full of possibilities, and it was mine.

I’m very slow. I’m a slow learner.

My mother loved fashion. She was a beauty and had enough sewing skills that she could re-create the looks in magazines. She also was enormously charismatic.

I’d like to direct something at the Public.

Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, ‘Why don’t you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?’ They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn’t want to associate with their past.

I did a benefit one night at Carnegie Hall with Bono and Lady Gaga and Rufus Wainwright.