Love Quote by Angela Lansbury

It’s not the glamour that sticks in Angela Lansbury’s memory; it’s the bruise. “Believe me, it jabs you” punctures the postcard version of Broadway stardom and replaces it with something sharper: adoration as a physical force, a needle you feel in your ribs. Lansbury is describing the intoxicating cruelty of being publicly wanted. Your face on the side of a bus isn’t just marketing, it’s a billboard-sized demand that you keep delivering the same high, on schedule, eight times a week.

The line works because it refuses the usual humility routine. She admits the seduction outright: when “New York loves you,” you “love to go out there every night.” That reciprocity is the trap. The city’s approval becomes a drug with a specific dosage, and the performer becomes both dealer and addict. Calling it “a race” is telling; this isn’t art as serene craft, it’s a sprint against the clock, the critics, your own fatigue, and the fear that the cheers might thin out.

Then she turns the nightly ritual into a conquest narrative: “Curtain opens, out you go, and New York is yours.” It’s thrilling, borderline imperial, and it hints at why stage actors talk about the audience like weather systems. You can’t control them, but when they’re with you, you feel omnipotent. The subtext is risk: the same city that can be “yours” tonight can be someone else’s tomorrow, and that knowledge is the jab that keeps you running.