PHOTOS | QUOTES | RANDOM

Some of George's better-known quotes from various interviews
Icons courtesy of Georgie.com (R) and Aldeus Rainbow (TM)

Fame

"Fame is the magnifying glass of that which you already are."
Health & Style Magazine
MEN Magazine
National Herald
KLIK Magazine

"All the spotlights in the world can't give you something you don't already have."
Health & Style Magazine
National Herald

 "A doctor goes to the hospital, wears his white robe, saves lives and remains unknown.
I put on a white robe, pretend I'm a doctor and become famous."
KLIK Magazine

"The only thing that changes with being recognized is that everything you do is magnified."
KLIK Magazine

"Fame doesn't create personality, and in many cases, we have seen it destroy it.
Even a criminal is famous, if you think about it, without having some talent or something to offer --
without doing the work demanded for an artist to attract the interest of common opinion. ...The right interest...
Since most of the publicity you see today in the arts has absolutely nothing to do with an artist's work."
PAPER Magazine

(Asked whether the word "star" has a different meaning in America than abroad):
"The word star is American. Let's start there."
MEN Magazine
KLIK Magazine

(Reporter: Do you feel like a "star"?):
"No one calls themselves a star. That's mainly the job of the Press.
I cannot say this for myself. "
KLIK Magazine

 "I still don't understand how a real doctor who saves a life in a hospital goes by unnoticed,
while an actor that plays him in a part gets glory, more money, and becomes an object of worship."
National Herald

 "Fame that you don't use to help others is useless -- on and off camera.
I raise my voice for the social matters to which I'm sensitive. But even there, the attention of the camera
should be given to those who need it, not us who support them."
PAPER Magazine

"The only difference is when people recognize me and therefore a distance of ten minutes
could take me double or triple the time because they talk to me."
KLIK Magazine

"Why refuse?
In the end, it's an opportunity to meet interesting people."
KLIK Magazine

(Reporter: Could you tell us the secret Jackie Onassis taught you
for confronting certain public occasions and people?):
"If I told you, what kind of secret would it be?"
Health & Style Magazine

Heart

"It's easy to love but difficult to be loved..."
Want Magazine / The Nation Newspaper (Thelo / Ethnos)

"I take things to heart because I have one.
How will I touch a viewer's heart if I've lost touch with mine?"
MEN Magazine

"Love struck by lightning rarely has a future.
True love emerges during a relationship."
Want Magazine / The Nation Newspaper (Thelo / Ethnos)

Self & Personality

"Only we can limit our own possibilities and our vision,
and isolate ourselves from the world around us."
MEN Magazine

"I simply do all that I can to be my best self.
I express what I am and my artistic vision."
Health & Style Magazine

"I do only what expresses me, and repeating the same bores me."
Madame Figaro

"I just do the things that I believe are right for me."
MEN Magazine

Family

"I believe in one god, my father. I have only one homeland, my mother."
MEN Magazine

"(The Opening Ceremony of the Olympics) was incredibly moving as an experience
to know that you're taking part in something that will remain forever,
and that you are being watched by four billion TV viewers in the world.
For me however, that night had an even greater worth,
because I knew that for the first time in the live audience my parents were watching me.
There's nothing more important than that."
PAPER Magazine

"The wisest words I've heard in my life are from my parents."
Health & Style Magazine

EllinoAmerican

"I value the life and possibilities America has given me. I feel proud and lucky to be Greek.
It's an enormous heritage and I do not forget my roots.
America, in essence made me more Greek."
Health & Style Magazine

"As a Greek and an artist, I want to bring Greece to the world and the world to Greece."
National Herald

"It's one thing to be an Ellino-American and another to be an Ellin in America."
Health & Style Magazine

New York

"The Big Apple easily becomes the Big Banana Peel."
Health & Style Magazine
MEN Magazine
National Herald

"In New York, the level defines the system.
In Greece, the system defines the level."
MEN Magazine
KLIK Magazine

"It's certainly the city where everything can happen -- and that's why it does."
MEN Magazine

"There's an energy here you don't find anywhere else.
And this is the melting pot of all cultures."
Times Ledger

Athina

"I love Athens very much and try as much as I can to discover the positives,
because if you want to find negatives in (any) city it's very easy."
KLIK Magazine

Art & Life

"What you cultivate is what blossoms."
I Magazine

"Life and art are bound together - one love."
MEN Magazine
National Herald

"It's life that I portray with my work. The highest art for me is Life itself."
Health & Style Magazine
MEN Magazine
National Herald

"I prefer to make my strongest statements with my work.
It's far more interesting and creative to tell your opinion with a song, a play, a movie, a book...
Otherwise, every opinion that someone tosses right and left, would be art."
PAPER Magazine

"Artists put themselves down better than the worst critics can."
Equity News

"There are accomplished giants in the arts who have more to say than I do."
PAPER Magazine

"I serve in art. I don't dictate the program."
The News / Golden Team 2004 Magazine (Ta Nea / Hrysi Omada 2004)

"If you know how to live well you enjoy life everywhere."
Men Magazine

Style & Fashion

"Good work is always in fashion."
Madame Figaro

Inspiration

"Above all, through a role, I want to inspire."
Health & Style Magazine

"I seek inspiration - it doesn't just fall like that, from the heavens."
MEN Magazine

(Reporter: "What gives you strength, what inspires you?")
"From the smallest pebble to the largest mountain.
Nature, love, man, life itself.
My mother, who represents all these things together, and creation.
My father, as a moving force, from which I think I have inherited this endless energy to do so many things!
Many people inspire me, more through their actions than through their words.
I'm inspired by high ideals and the things that are acquired with labor.
Generally whatever makes you a better human being."
PAPER Magazine

"It's important to do what inspires you."
National Herald

Work & Career

"I am my work."
MEN Magazine

"Being me is a full-time job."
Madame Figaro

"Fame isn't work. It doesn't improve a performance, it's not what defines success (at least not for me),
and you can't put fame on a resume. Only work goes on a resume."
PAPER Magazine

"I concentrate on doing my work as best as I can. Countless rehearsals, practice -- and I never stop writing.
I don't know if there's a 'recipe'. Work is work -- so long as it's done within my artistic standards, then we proceed."
Health & Style Magazine

"It's one thing dedicating yourself to something and another taking a suitcase for a trip to New York,
then going back and saying that because you came by here, or took a class in some free studio,
you made a career."
Men Magazine

"I prefer that my work speaks about me, not I about it."
Health & Style Magazine

"I couldn't refuse a collaboration that excites me and simultaneously challenges me."
PAPER Magazine

"I don't try to satisfy my own un-satisfiable standards of perfection,
that's impossible and counterproductive."
MEN Magazine

"I believe that no matter what I've done, what matters is what I'm doing next."
Health & Style Magazine

(Reporter: Have you been granted many opportunities to play what you write?)
"Opportunities are not granted. They are claimed and earned."
Health & Style Magazine

"The matter is to have proper and good collaborations
because you cannot do anything alone."
KLIK Magazine

"I only take a job if I feel that I have something to contribute with it."
PAPER Magazine

"Work, work, work."
Health & Style Magazine

"I've never stopped working.
Only once, after a tour in which we ate breakfast in Georgia, lunch in Virginia and dinner in Ohio.
I took a break."
KLIK Magazine

"Work is what stays."
PAPER Magazine

(Reporter: "When will you rest?")
"One day I will rest for a very, very long time."
MEN Magazine

Rewards

"In my field "first place" isn't something you take, but something you are given.
Therefore you don't start a job aiming at some 'first place.'
I'm an actor and writer, not a champion athlete."
PAPER Magazine

"As far as that front page story, I don't think I have something to say further
than what it says itself, on its own. It's an unbelievable honor."
PAPER Magazine

"Being first is nice, naturally, but it's never permanent and no one can predict it --
others decide these results, not I, no matter how much these honor me."
PAPER Magazine

"The win is doing your best job. That's the win of every situation."
The Courier

Trust & Faith

"If you have trust in yourself and the forces that guide your life,
if you see the signs that are all around you,
in the end you manage to head in the right direction and succeed."
KLIK Magazine

"I do believe that if you do something you love, everything else comes."
PAPER Magazine

Luck

"Achieving something is more a matter of talent and industriousness, than luck --
even though I believe that luck, in the end, rewards industrious people.
I feel lucky because no matter what I do professionally,
that which counts most for me is my personal and emotional happiness.
I am first a human being, and then an artist."
Health & Style Magazine

Opinions & Media

"I don't think that my own viewpoint counts more than the viewpoint of the person who reads mine.
Much gets stated today, but in essence, little has meaning."
PAPER Magazine

"We live in a society that the media has gotten us used to expect comments (soundbites)
for the slightest thing -- particularly from the eponymous."
PAPER Magazine

Multiple Choice Talent

"...They ask me 'if you had to choose one thing and one thing only,
what would you choose from all that you do?'
As if you should choose between theater and music, acting and creating.
We're not talking about apples and oranges, but the pieces that compose exactly that which I am.
Choose what? Whether I am me or not?"
Madame Figaro

"I didn't choose the musical. The musical chose me because I do it all: sing, dance, act."
Esquire

"For each person, I'm something else.
Without change, you don't learn something new. Without risk, there's no success.
This need to risk, to change, to do many different things at once,
is the main reason, I believe, that the musical chose me."
PAPER Magazine

(Reporter: Why is the Broadway musical considered so demanding and why did you choose it?)
"The American musical is an art that combines many things I love...
The added difficulty is the technical -- truly you must have it all. To be what we call here "a triple threat."
I suppose that because I have the ability to do all the things that it demands simultaneously,
in essence, the musical chose me more than I chose it."
Health & Style Magazine

"The advantage of a musical actor is that at any given moment,
you can be offered a dramatic role in a play or film, because you're right for it.
This has happened to me many times, to go from a musical to some heavy drama.
The opposite doesn't apply to actors who do only prose
and don't have the elements that a dramatic musical demands.
I'm also referring to movie productions, since we have left far behind us the days
where in movie musicals, others dubbed the stars in studios.
In the theatrical musical, you also need a lot of specialized knowledge and comfort in that environment,
so that the technology used in super spectacles doesn't alter your performance
and the collaboration with the live orchestra that accompanies you.
You learn a lot this way."
PAPER Magazine

Success

"Success is only the beginning."
Health & Style Magazine

"I never wanted 'to succeed' in something, that was not my target.
Even now, what I want is to do things that express me and that are real."
KLIK Magazine

"Success isn't something that's owed (guaranteed) to anyone,
i.e., just because you chase it, it will happen to you.
It happens to some and to others it doesn't.
It's even in the root of the (Greek) word: Epi Tyhi! (Upon Luck)
It's healthier to concentrate on the quality of your work,
what truly represents you as an artist and a human being --
wherever that may lead you."
Health & Style Magazine

"What counts is your talent, your industriousness, your decisiveness,
whether you are collaborative, whether you love what you do...
and in the bottom line... whether it's your destiny!
No matter what anyone does, they can't force success! Not just here, nowhere."
Health & Style Magazine

Drama

"Greeks, we know something about theatre..."
Equity News

"Acting is one thing, pretending is another."
MEN Magazine

 
"If the only thing that interests the protagonist is how to win the chosen "lass" of his heart...
I don't even open such scripts."
MEN Magazine

"By acting you don't just honor the stage, but all the greats who have stepped on it before you."
Esquire

(Reporter: The director of the drama school he studied had told him that he's not fit to be an actor.)
"If I had listened to her, my life would have taken a different turn."
(Reporter: We're glad he didn't...)
National Herald

Audiences

"The public doesn't have a common mind.
They're not an amorphous maze."
MEN Magazine

"The audience are those who will show what work you do."
National Herald

(Interviewed about "Greek Gifts"):
"I did it for the American audiences. To show them... that Greek music is not just bouzouki."
National Herald

"I feel honored by these critical acclaims, more than you can imagine.
And above all for the love of an audience, because all this is done for the audience,
and it's them I give myself to with my work."
PAPER Magazine

"I'm not interested in being perfect, but for the spectator to feel."
The News / Golden Team 2004 Magazine (Ta Nea / Hrysi Omada 2004)

"The musical isn't TV, you don't need to explain everything.
The audience partakes emotionally in a live performance, it creates with you, you don't feed them reality with a spoon.
To be in a theatrical audience is a collective, interactive experience. There is energy.
There's no room for doubt that cinema "travels" you and gives a magic dimension to everything,
especially to the musical -- I grew up with movie musicals.
For me, the Broadway musical today is cinema in 3-D.
And because a live actor interprets and talks directly to the live audience,
the magic of cinema is alive in the imagination of the theater audience member today,
larger than the largest screen."
PAPER Magazine

Broadway & Live Performance

"I get stage fright, but when I'm out there I'm safe.
Before I get on, I'm a mess, but when I step on stage I'm in my element."
Times Ledger

"I am a live singer-actor flesh and bone, I need live musicians! Broadway is not karaoke!
To sing means to breathe, to phrase and express words in different ways, live.
What would happen with a computer if a bug occurs?"
Le Monde

"I like knowing that someone wants to see me so much, they come from far."
PAPER Magazine

(Reporter: I read in the French "Le Monde" your statement during the recent historical strike to keep the music live on Broadway.)
"What I had to say was that, well, I'm Greek... I know something about theater... It must be live!
You can't remove the musicians from the musical and put in a computer or canned music in playback.
Then it's karaoke! Then you might as well remove the live actors and put robots."
Health & Style

Destiny

"It was destiny. The theater kept coming up in my path."
Esquire

"I really believe that if it's your destiny to achieve your dreams nothing can stop you."
KLIK Magazine

"I don't even fence" was my initial reaction when I was cast.
"Give it a little time, it'll grow on you," was the cast coordinator's response.
Grow on me? I was thrilled with the honor and for having been chosen from across an ocean
to contribute my talent for this once-in-a-lifetime historic performance in front of the whole world."
Equity News

"I believe it's destiny.
One day the phone rings, and Cindy Adams from the New York Post introduces herself to me.
Just like that. ...I didn't even know if she was someone making a prank call.
She said she had learned I was writing a new dramatic musical with
unusual musical structure... and she asked me whether it's true.
I didn't ask her how she found out, where she found my number, or why she cared.
Destiny was calling and I answered: 'Yes'."
Madame Figaro

"I think we all know what we have been destined for,
and if we don't know it from the start, we discover it at some point."
KLIK Magazine

"These things happen to you, or not. Everything is a matter of destiny and work.
That's what I believe."
Men Magazine

The Big Picture

"The most important things are the simplest -- the basics."
Men Magazine

"I'm concentrating on the present -- That creates the future...
As for ...the big picture... of a career, it's very early in my life for anyone to see that,
and it's a thing others will say, some future day,
from what my work itself will have said about me and my life."
Health & Style Magazine

(Reporter: ...the 'Incomparable Performer' was compared to a legendary figure... Melina Merkouri...
"Just that my name was in the same sentence as hers, it's an honor," he adds in awe.)
Madame Figaro

(Reporter: His advice for new artists who dream of a successful career
is to think positively and to listen to their heart.)
National Herald

"Simply, I think that from everything in our life
we must carry with us the best and most positive piece of it."
KLIK Magazine

"You might not get to change the world. But you might change somebody's world."
GeorgeCostacos.com / News Section / Tsunami Relief Statement

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