Joel Grey Quotes
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There are problems in doing television that have been plaguing me for years. I really like to have a lot of time, to rehearse and make things as good as they can be, but television often doesn't allow for that.
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There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I was totally delighted, interested in, and amused by my stint on 'Voyager.'
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I never learned to speak Yiddish, ever.
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I don't look like Brad Pitt.
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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.
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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.
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'Cabaret' was the most commercial success that I've been involved in.
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I saw Lee J. Cobb in 'Death of a Salesman' when I was about 15, and I couldn't get up from my seat in the theater; I was so... I was weeping, and I was upset. And I find that people are still like that in a similar circumstance in a theater today, where they just can't get up. It's too heartbreaking.
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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.
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I used to eat Danny Kaye's food. I had his Chinese and Italian meals, and that was as good as it gets.
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Whenever I get to work with great actors, I'm happy.
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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.
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Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.
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Eight times a week, I got to be a gay man, a remarkable gay man, and every night, that felt as full, as true, as passionate, and as authentic as I ever felt in my life.
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After my bar mitzvah, I started to assimilate, to really not pay attention to my roots. The anti-Semitic experiences of my youth had been very painful. You try to put all that in the past and become a person of the world. I think that's the right thing to do. But it's not right to leave out who you really are. That's a tragedy.
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When you cast cross-racially, another dimension is added.
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My father was the one who used to stand up in the middle of a number to flutter his lips and make sputtering sounds into lyrics.
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I never thought I would sing or dance - ever, ever, ever. My idea was to be Laurence Olivier or Peter Lorre or some great classical actor. I thought I'd be a character actor.
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I'm always interested in the challenge of doing something new.
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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.