The joy that I feel when I’m on stage, I can’t explain it to anyone. It feels like that first breath of a child. It’s sore and it’s uncomfortable but it’s a sign of life

You are never so alone as when you are ill on stage. The most nightmarish feeling in the world is suddenly to feel like throwing up in front of four thousand people.

I cry all the time. In fact, I cried when we were at the Islington Academy. I got a bit teary-eyed at the crowd's reaction to our show. We were playing a song called On My Own and the response from the audience just got to me. Sometimes the love in the room is so overwhelming that I just cry. I'm not ashamed of that.

Few things make me more livid than insulting bad theatre of any sort. Conversely, perfectly realised and exquisitely elegant performance can move me deeply and reduce me to sobbing like a big girl.

It is very difficult to explain what takes place in me when I see or hear anything majestic which allows no doubt that it proceeds from the actualization of Our Maker Creator. Each time, my tears flow of themselves. I weep, that is to say, it weeps in me, not from grief, no, but as if from tenderness.

I am mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it's the only place where I'm happy.

I did not scream or hug anyone. In fact, as the noise gained momentum, I felt its opposite, a draining of excitement. But not a draining of tension - my body was still stiff and alert, and the impulse I had, strangely, was to weep. Not because I was sad but because I was not happy, and yet, like my classmates, I'd experienced an emotional surge, I too felt the need for expression. This phenomenon -- being gripped by an overwhelming wave of feeling that was clearly not the feeling of the people around me -- had also happened at a pep rally: It made me uncomfortable, because I didn't want anyone to notice that I wasn't jumping up and down or cheering, and it also thrilled me, because it made the world seem full of possibilities that could make my heart pound. I think, looking back, that this was the single best thing about Ault, the sense of possibility… In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.

The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.

Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.

"Weep," said Athos, "weep, heart full of love, youth, and life! Alas, would I could weep like you!"

It turned out to be very emotional.

Every time that love has made me weep,
I have rejoiced that love could be so strong.

The continual emotion that is felt in the theater excites us, enervates us, enfeebles us, and makes us less able to resist our passions. And the sterile interest taken in virtue serves only to satisfy our vanity without obliging us to practice it.

There's always been an emotion in my voice because it reached back to the life I was living. Where there were tears on stage, it wasn't Hollywood, it was real.