Selected audience quotes

1. Speeches easy to young speakers are generally very difficult to old listeners.

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

3. My play was a complete success. The audience was a failure.

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

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

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

7. Fantasy is literature for teenagers.

8. 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.

9. 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.

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

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. [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.

15. 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?

16. 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.

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

18. 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.

19. Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them.

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

26. Great artists suffer for the people.

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

28. I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.

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

30. [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.

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

32. I want people to go to the movies. I am the man of the spectacle. I'm playing.

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

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

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

36. 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.

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

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

42. I like any and all of my associations with music- writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

43. I don't think he said 'nigger' he said 'wogs'. He definitely said, 'Keep Britain White'. Nobody cheered, but after he played another song, he did the same again. It was extraordinary - but he stood there being overtly offensive and racist. I was completely mystified as to why this man playing black music would behave this way.

44. There are now many invisible people on stage.

45. Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

46. I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.

47. If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.

48. If one has no heart, one cannot write for the masses.

49. The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

50. I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere, - for I have had a little experience in that business, - that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country, - and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent.

51. 'My music is best understood by children and animals.'

52. When they laugh at one of my jokes... it just gets me right here. [Places his hand on his heart]

53. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

54. Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you.

55. The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.

56. I try to bring the audience's own drama - tears and laughter they know about - to them.

57. Guy from audience: 'Your wife is your beard!'

58. On one hand I'll stand up there and think I'm a pretty good storyteller but it has everything to do with the audience. Invariably, I get people telling me that I should do stand-up. Stand-ups generate their own material, but I'm up there answering questions and they lob me softballs.

59. For Halloween, I want to be Lenny Bruce, I want them to hate me, so you can love me on the sly.

60. The result of the struggle between the thought and the ability to express it, between dream and reality, is seldom more than a compromise or an approximation. Thus there is little chance that we will succeed in getting through to a large audience, and on the whole we are quite satisfied if we are understood and appreciated by a small number of sensitive, receptive people.

61. 'At least Bharatanatyam is now world famous, with thousands of new votaries. What about Koodiyattam?.....I have done what I can. It has not been easy. One has to sacrifice a lot to learn Koodiyattam. How many persons will be ready for it these days? Will there be an audience capable of imbibing it? ' - Mani Madhava Chakyar to famous Bharatanatyam dancer Rukmini Dev Arundale, while latter visitited Guru at his residence[1]

62. A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.

63. Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

64. We've obviously got what the people want. It's aggressive music and I think America likes aggression.

65. Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.

66. I think no matter what we cover, people tend to see what we cover through their own particular political or personal prisms. I always ask people to be specific what they're talking about. You can't cover the Middle East - you can't cover American politics - you can't cover America these days without finding people in one place or another taking exception to what we do. I think it goes with the territory. Keeps me, at least I hope, mindful, always that there's at least one other opinion and sometimes a dozen other opinions. And they all bear accounting for. But not everybody is right you know because somebody says, 'well you did X', and you say 'well, maybe X is right in some cases'.

67. With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.

68. The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.

69. Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.

70. I have written the tale of our life For a sheltered people's mirth, In jesting guise - but ye are wise, And ye know what the jest is worth.

71. I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them.

72. We caught a lot of people off guard, which is cool. And I think we made things more enjoyable for the boyfriends who had been dragged to the concert.

73. 'Tune in next week, Same Stone Cold Time, Same Stone Cold Channel!' (parody of the most famous Batman ending narration: Tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!)

74. 'There aren't many laughs in that and I remember doing a look and everybody laughed and I just thought, wow, that's incredible how you can do that. So I did another look and they laughed again and then I remember thinking, hold on, this isn't right for this piece, you've got to stop it.'

75. I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

76. I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.

77. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again - all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and - I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.

78. Benny has done more than raise millions of dollars to erase operating deficits of major orchestras. He has brought multitudes of people who would not otherwise be there into the concert halls to prove that music can be entertaining and rewarding. ~ Leonard Bernstein

79. There's one particular moment during that concert that I shall recall as long as I live. Its when the entire audience jumped to its feet and shouted, 'More! More!' it was right after Jack had announced there would be a five-minute intermission! ~ Zubin Mehta

80. Will it play in Peoria?

81. [crowdmember yells out 'Freebird'] Please quit yelling that. It's not funny, it's not clever; it's stupid, it's repetitive. Why the fuck would you continue to yell that? I'm serious. [crowdmember yells out 'Kevin Matthews'] Okay, Kevin Matthews. What does that mean now? [voice slowly rising] Now what does it mean? I understand where it comes from, so do you. Now what does it all mean? What is the culmination of yelling that? [crowdmember yells out 'Jimmy Shorts'] Jimmy Shorts. He's not here. He's not gonna be here, now what? Now where are we? [voice rises faster] We're here with you interrupting me again, you fucking idiot! That's : you see where we're at? We're here at the same point again, where you, the fucking peon masses, can once again ruin anyone who tries to do anything because you don't know how to do it on your own! [shouting] That's where we're fucking at! Once again, the useless wastes of fucking flesh that has ruined everything good in this goddamn world! That's where we're at! Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever! Kill 'em all, Adolf, all of 'em! Jew, Mexican, American, white, kill 'em all! Start over, the experiment didn't work! [despairingly] Rain forty days, please fucking rain to wash these turds off my fucking life! Wash these human wastes of flesh and bone off this planet! I pray to you, God, to kill these fucking people! [crowdmember yells out 'Freebird' again] [utterly deflated] Freebird. And in the beginning there was the word 'Freebird' and 'Freebird' would be yelled throughout the centuries. 'Freebird', the mantra of the moron! 'Freebird', 'Freebird', 'Freebird', 'Freebird'. If we keep yelling this, one day we'll be funny. Keep doing it. 'Freebird', 'Freebird', 'Freebird', 'Freebird'. We will sit at the feet of Kevin Matthews. 'Freebird', 'Freebird', 'Freebird'. [audience joins in] 'Free-' I'm feeling enlightened! 'Freebird'. Oh, how holy. 'Well, I don't think this is going to be a 'get-laid' set for me, so, uh : [laughter] Well, Bill, good guess. But I'm not leaving, fuckers. As I said, you will be the first to leave. Ah well, we have a long night ahead of us: