267 Audience Quotes

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

Wave after wave of love flooded the stage and washed over me, the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

Most drag impersonations are a drag. But women can like Geraldine, men can like Geraldine, everyone can like Geraldine.

In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.

San Francisco has always been my favorite booing city. I don't mean the people boo louder or longer, but there is a very special intimacy. When they boo you, you know they mean you. Music, that's what it is to me. One time in Kezar Stadium they gave me a standing boo.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.

[Malipiero's advice to Casanova.] If you wish your audience to cry, you must shed tears yourself, but if you wish to make them laugh you must contrive to look as serious as a judge.

Those of you who speak only English, applaud [audience applause]. Those of you who speak only Spanish, applaud [audience applause]. [In mock incredulity] Then how do you know what I just said?

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

A patriotic song is an emotion and you must not embarrass an audience with it, or they will hate your guts.

It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century.

Can you appreciate music without playing it? Yes, you can. You can appreciate baseball without playing it. Many people attend a football game merely for the crowd, the excitement, the color.

I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you're doing something.

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.

Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist.

An artist carries on throughout his life a mysterious, uninterrupted conversation with his public.

If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day.

[It] was written and sold. I knew it was a strong story because I cared about it and believed in it. I had no idea that it would have the effect it had on the audience. While most people ignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives without reading it or anything else by me, there was still a surprisingly large group who responded to the story with some fervency.

If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

I don't just go out there and run. I like to give people watching something exciting.

I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.

I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.

The grand tune is the only thing in music that the great public really understands.

Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

We like to have a point of view in our stories, not an obvious moral, but a worthwhile theme. ... All we are trying to do is give the public good entertainment. That is all they want.

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

Letterman: 'I want to thank you folks for coming out for this run-through show. Thank you very much. This, of course, will never see the light of day. You won't miss a thing tonight.'

Letterman: 'Oh, stop it! Will you stop? Ladies and gentlemen, turn down your volume. Turn down the volume immediately! She can't be stopped! There's something wrong with her!'

Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all...Here we have 'leftist' confusion instead of natural human music. The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, 'formalist' attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.

Look at you just looking at the Rock, gawking at the Rock; you ought to be ashamed of yourself, a woman your age looking at the Rock like this!'

What's happening with Chris Jericho and The RocK? (During his fued with Chris Jericho)

For the millions... and millions of The Rock's fans...

Don't clap, I'm not a fucking jazz band.

Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor, Most gracious singer of high poems! where The dancers will break footing, from the care Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.

Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.

Astaire really sweat - he toiled. He was a humorless Teutonic man, the opposite of his debonair image in top hat and tails. I liked him because he was an entertainer and an artist. There's a distinction between them. An artist is concerned only with what is acceptable to himself, where an entertainer strives to please the public. Astaire did both. Louis Armstrong was another one.

Hello everybody! Hey hey hey! Okay! You know it's not very often we do shows in the daytime and I fucking wish we'd done before, I can see you all now. And we've got some beauties here tonight, I can tell you!

'As long as the music is still there, and as long as the people are still buying the music, then, then it's OK. When they stop stop buying our records, then I'll say goodbye and do something else, become a strip artist or something.'

'Most of what I like, is for the audience to really feel like they're really there, virtually part of the show.'

'We want you all to have a really good time, it's like a Queen carnival, so enjoy yourself' -Quote to TV audience before rock in rio.

You have taken far too much trouble over your opera. Here in England that is mere waste of time. What the English like is something that they can beat time to, something that hits them straight on the drum of the ear.

When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing.

Growing has no connection with audience. Audience has no connection with identity. Identity has no connection with a universe. A universe has no connection with human nature.

Although I don't look back warmly on this final stage of my career, at least I am not embarrassed by anything I was connected with. There were no horror pictures and no sleaze. Everything was geared to what they call 'family audiences.' I'm proud of that.

I've never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He's made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, feminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mindnumbingly boring.

The movies I've been in are full of interesting ambiguity and it's really nice to know that audiences are responding to an ambiguity. They don't always want something totally clear and spoon-fed. I give credit to my generation because I feel like they're really responding somehow to it and it's really cool. Both these movies changed my life in the process of making them.

'It's your radio station. Not theirs.' I think that should be your tag line.

I think there's a certain moment when you're right in time with your audience and then you both grow out of it, and you just have to realize that it's not that you have outgrown the audience, it's just that the audience and you both are too old for that. That has to go on something else, and let the younger people do that.

'You can clap along if you want to, and if you don't, well, then fuck it.'

Sir - As a playgoer of forty years standing, may I say that I heartily agree with Peter Pinnell in his condemnation of 'Entertaining Mr Sloane'. I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion. And to be told that such a disgusting piece of filth now passes for humour! Today's young playwrights take it upon themselves to flaunt their contempt for ordinary decent people. I hope that the ordinary decent people of this country will shortly strike back! Yours truly, Edna Welthorpe (Mrs)

Men fall, roughly speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the face of Art, and does not demand to be appeased before their emotions can be stirred; and those who, having a speculative bent of mind, must first be satisfied by an enlightening quality in a work of Art, before that work of Art can awaken in them feeling. The audience of the realist is drawn from this latter type of man; the much larger audience of the romantic artist from the former; together with, in both cases, those fastidious few for whom all Art is style and only style, and who welcome either kind, so long as it is good enough.

I never did understand the resentment about Country artists 'going pop'. Either you've got what it takes to appeal to a whole lot of people, or you don't.

Good evening everybody, ladies, gentlemen... Felicity.

Faith! he must make his stories shorter or change his comrades once a quarter.

'It's a nice feeling. I was not like the popular guy in high school. This is revenge for all the bullies in high school [laughter]. It's a great feeling. Maybe women sometimes are more open to romantic music.'

I'd rather have a show that a hundred people need to see than a thousand people like to see.

She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation. (p. 217)

I believe in neither a director's nor a writer's theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.

The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.

Whatever he does, he must do in a more decided and daring manner than any one else; he lounges with extravagance, and yawns so as to alarm the reader!

You can sit there and have a universal experience, of fear, of anger, of tears, of love, and I discovered that its the audience, really, that is doing the acting.

People are throwing panties at you. They certainly never do that at my book-signings.

The iron test is: Do you laugh? If you laugh, you know they're gonna laugh.

I don't care what the editor likes or dislikes, I care what the people like.

(to audience) I like the way this is situated here. It seems like you guys were chasing me, closing in, and then said 'fuck it...lets sit down'.

'Shut up white boy!' -- Replying to a loud heckler at United Palace Theatre in New York City, December 18, 2007.

Oprah is different. Oprah has an army out there that really listens. She's one of the great marketing machines in history.

If you write like James Joyce, you will have an audience of twenty. The other nineteen - besides your mother, because your father won't read it - will only be reading it to find out how on earth you got published.

I look at these kids, you know, and I could be their mother, their mistress, their older woman. Some of the kids at the concerts are 15.

I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things, because they haven't seen anything better, or anything different.

Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser's delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it - not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.

Audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at 'good taste' of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it's a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That's what they go to burlesque for.

People who are just getting 'seriously interested' in film always ask a critic, 'Why don't you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more?' The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn't very interesting.

The small triumph of 'The Graduate' was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate - which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him.

The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it's one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet - one doesn't expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn't go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.

One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history - probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension - a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.

TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.

It would be very convincing to say that there's no hope for movies - that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there's plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn't mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they'd felt something: they'd been brutalized. It was like an entertainment contrived in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World by the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering.

It tackles a wonderful subject without preening, and brings it off unassertively - so unassertively that the movie is in danger of being overlooked. (Variety has already dismissed it as something 'for a very limited audience.') We're getting to the point where the press assumes that movie audiences won't be willing to bring anything to a picture, and warns them off.

It is better to have the child in the chimney corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than to have the poem a puzzle to which that meaning is the only key. Still, complicated subjects make complicated poems, and some of the best poems can move only the best readers; this is one more question of curves of normal distribution. I have tried to make my poems plain, and most of them are plain enough; but I wish that they were more difficult because I had known more.

I remember when hard-core first became commonplace, and there were discussions about what it would be like if a serious director ever made a porn movie. The answer, judging by Anatomy of Hell, is that the audience would decide they did not require such a serious director after all.

I could list some Japanese films illustrating this, but the last thing the audience for Memoirs of a Geisha wants to see is a more truthful film with less gorgeous women and shabbier production values.

I arrive at the end of this review having done my duty as a critic. I have described the movie accurately and you have a good idea what you are in for if you go to see it. Most of you will not. I cannot argue with you. Some of you will--the brave and the curious. You embody the spirit of the man who first wondered what it would taste like to eat an oyster.

The movie delights me with its cocky confidence that the audience can keep up. Primer is a film for nerds, geeks, brainiacs, Academic Decathlon winners, programmers, philosophers and the kinds of people who have made it this far into the review. It will surely be hated by those who 'go to the movies to be entertained', and embraced and debated by others, who will find it entertains the parts the others do not reach.

Why did they give an R rating to a movie perfect for teenagers?

A children's movie is a movie at which adults are bored. A grown-up movie is a movie at which children are bored. A family movie is a movie at which, if it's good, nobody is bored.