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. Let blockheads read what blockheads write.

42. Each play worth seeing should be watched a second time on the faces of the audience.

43. Mark: Um. I don't know Hayley. I don't know. Because I admire the fact that you keep challenging yourself. You know, last week was an enormous challenge for you and you keep doing that and I don't want to discourage that because it's a fantastic thing about you. But honestly, I just really don't think that you totally connected with that at the level that Anastacia actually bought the meaning of that song and what it meant to her. I didn't feel it from you. It didn't connect for me like some of the others that you've done have.

44. 'This is for all the men who wanna see me, and for all the women...who want to BE me!'

45. I'm all about pleasing the fans.

46. THE ROCK: All the Rock's fans are chanting his name... CROWD: 'Rock-y! Rock-y! Rock-y!... MANKIND (slightly out of sync with the crowd): 'Rock-y! Rock-y!...'

47. What's the matter with all you people at the back, did you come here to see Gloria Estefan? (11/27/93 at AT&T Bayfront Park Amphitheater, Miami, Florida)

48. ...What people miss about (Marilyn) Manson is that he is just reflecting, he's an artist, people want to focus that energy on him, but it's not really him, it's really about you. So for every guy sitting there with a beer and a .45 in his belt, Manson is just speaking to that end of society. He's speaking as an artist. He's not speaking as himself, and that's where people get really lost with Manson.

49. What does an instinctively popular poet do in contemporary America, where serious poetry is no longer a popular art? The public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence. Indeed, even if they were aware of his poetry, they would feel no need to approach it. Cut off from his proper audience, this poet feels little sympathy with the specialized minority readership that now sustains poetry either as a highly sophisticated verbal game or secular religion. His sensibility shows little similarity to theirs except for the common interest in poetry. And so the popular poet usually leads a marginal existence in literary life. His fellow poets look on him as an anomaly or an anachronism. Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy. Publishers see little prestige attached to printing his work. Critics, who have been trained to celebrate complexity, consider him an amiable simpleton.

50. I want a poetry that can learn as much from popular culture as from serious culture. A poetry that seeks the pleasure and emotionality of the popular arts without losing the precision, concentration, and depth that characterize high art. I want a literature that addresses a diverse audience distinguished for its intelligence, curiosity, and imagination rather than its professional credentials. I want a poetry that risks speaking to the fullness of our humanity, to our emotions as well as to our intellect, to our senses as well as our imagination and intuition. Finally I hope for a more sensual and physical art - closer to music, film, and painting than to philosophy or literary theory. Contemporary American literary culture has privileged the mind over the body. The soul has become embarrassed by the senses. Responding to poetry has become an exercise mainly in interpretation and analysis. Although poetry contains some of the most complex and sophisticated perceptions ever written down, it remains an essentially physical art tied to our senses of sound and sight. Yet, contemporary literary criticism consistently ignores the sheer sensuality of poetry and devotes its considerable energy to abstracting it into pure intellectualization. Intelligence is an irreplaceable element of poetry, but it needs to be vividly embodied in the physicality of language. We must - as artists, critics, and teachers - reclaim the essential sensuality of poetry. The art does not belong to apes or angels, but to us. We deserve art that speaks to us as complete human beings. Why settle for anything less?

51. 'This next song is only dedicated to the beautiful people here tonight. That means all of you. Thank you for coming along and making this a great occasion.' -Live Aid, 1985

52. 'Okay, what should we do for you now? Let me see. Would you like something a bit softer, something quiet, or something heavier?' -Earls Court, 1977

53. ' OK, are you ready to rock? Are you ready to roll with us! OK, let's do it!' - 'Live Killers' album, 1979

54. 'Good evening all you rock'n'rollers!' -Earls Court, 1977

55. They wanted to know how I succeeded in getting so much publicity, I said by having a small audience, I said if you have a big audience you have no publicity, this did seem to worry them and naturally it would worry them they wanted the publicity and the big audience, and really to have the biggest publicity you have to have a small one, yes all right the biggest publicity comes from the realest poetry and the realest poetry has a small audience not a big one, but it is really exciting and therefore it has the biggest publicity, all right that is it. ~ Ch. 4

56. 'Live for Loving You' is a kind of song that really can live in many different genres. And, of course, when you do your live performances the first time that you perform a song you want to stay true to the record: because tha's what people want to hear, they want to hear the hit. But then after you have done it fifty thousand times and through many, many different tours, you start experimenting and doing stuff to surprise people. So, the cut that we are doing here for the 'iTunes Orginal' is something that we love to do -- because we just took it and really broke it down to a Samba. You know, the Brazilians have an amazing edge -- percussively, I think -- they have amazing rhythms. And this song really fit that rhythm very nicely. So, we wanted to do it acoustically and really cool -- and like we've done many times on tour. Just break it down to just acoustic, no synths and things of that nature: just make it organic. And I love that song for that reason: because you could perform it with just a couple of bongos and some vocals if you had to. And it would still work.

57. 'Are you guys hot?' - Josh

58. Rush has so much contempt for his listeners. He has contempt for you. Because day after day after day after day, he pulls stuff out of his butt that isn't true, and...he's not held accountable for it. No, you don't hold him accountable for it. For you it's just, 'Ok...that was wrong, but......Why does he (Rush Limbaugh) say something like that? He either knows it isn't true, or-he can't possibly know that it's true?...There is certainly no certainty there on his part of 'I'm going to tell the truth now.

59. Welcome to the View child

60. If you're calling from South America, good for you.

61. Do you like pie?

62. When I got back from the war in 1946 people didn't want the Mr. Smith kind of movie any more, and I refused to make war pictures.

63. This song is dedicated to Frank Zappa, and River Phoenix, Fred Gwynne who played Herman Munster, Dixie Lee Ray, Thomas P, Tip O'Neil, and you, dumb ass, who just threw water on me.

64. I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with 'expressing' myself with obscure creative impressions.

65. Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

66. Here's something you don't hear said about many movie critics: people love Roger Ebert. ... There's a good reason for this: Ebert doesn't stand between moviegoers and the audience. Rather, his regular readers are serious movie-lovers who see him as their rep, the guy out there fighting to make movies less stupid, more entertaining, more intelligent, more everything. You don't have to agree with him - and I certainly didn't in this book, when he ragged on Team America and Jesus is Magic, two movies where I laughed myself sick - to know that he's on your side. He sees the bad movies so you don't have to, and he's seen the same ones over and over. ... Mere bile, though, isn't his game; he's as interested in why movies fail as why they work. A lot of the time, it's obvious: because it's made by morons for morons. In these cases, Ebert drags us through the plot in as entertaining a fashion as possible. ... Forty years on, he's still a moviegoer's best friend.

67. To be able to be put in front of a huge audience like this, to be able to sing some of the greatest songs in the American songbook ever written by the greatest lyricists, with great melodies-- as long as you stay true to yourself and you're honest about the work, how can that be a bad thing?

68. A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption, but if your popular lies are too blatant and your more intellectual section are shocked and see through them, they may (and indeed they did) begin to be suspicious as to whether they were not being hoodwinked too. Nevertheless, the inmates of colleges are just as credulous as the inmates of the slums.

69. 'I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say 'for the triad'; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.'

70. 'All Right, Mothertruckers'

71. They certainly are not great writers, but they speak their country's language and they make themselves heard.

72. I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

73. Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

74. I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.

75. I'm a philanthropist: I give people what they want. People love being horrified, terrified.

76. They like to put their toe in the cold water of fear.

77. A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.

78. And then I come to find out after that film, that all the lesbian sex scenes : let me repeat that. All the lesbian sex scenes : were cut out of that film because the test audience was turned off by them. Boy, is my thumb not on the pulse of America. I don't want to seem like Randy Pan, the Goat Boy, but that was the only reason I went to that piece of shit. If I had been in that test audience, the only one out front protesting that film would have been Michael Douglas, demanding his part be put back in, all right. 'I swear I was in that movie. I swear I was!' 'Gee, Mike. The movie started. Sharon Stone was eating another woman for an hour and a half. Then the credits rolled. I don't remember seeing your scrawny ass, Mike.' 'Was Bill Hicks in that test audience?'

79. Have you seen what they're doing to movies now? They show the movie to a test audience, then change it depending on whether these 200 random yahoos liked it or did not like it, as though we are all one, as though we all have the same taste, as though, as though, as though.

80. Alice is much a focused rebellion, he's a fantastic cartoon character almost, if you like, and therefore he's still successful today-my kid, 11 years old, loves Alice Cooper.

81. His formidable originality within the picture-book convention may not have been altogether apparent to Keeping himself, which is both a strength and a weakness: the strength that he could communicate with unrivalled emotional intensity - but possibly only with one child in twenty; the concomitant weakness is that there was not a lot he could do to broaden this minority appeal and ensure that his books remained in print over longer periods. ~ Douglas Martin in Charles Keeping: an illustrator's life (1993)

82. You want to be able to provide something, and you're pissing down a fucking well. It will suck you dry and take everything you have and, like being a parent, you can pour as much love as you want, and your kid still says, 'Just let me right out here, you don't have to take me all the way.' You're working to make yourself obsolete. I'm not going to make Persona - my movies are fairly obvious in what the people want and what it is that's happening; it;s not that internalized. What's internalized is how you process the information from the singular, subjective point of view. And that becomes the subtext of it.

83. I do like movies that take a toll on the audience. I want to work the subconscious. I want to involve you in ways in which you might not necessarily want to get involved. I want to play off those things that you're expecting to get when the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up. There's an audience expectation and I'm interested in how movies play with--and off--that expectation. That's what I'm interested in.

84. I don't have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people.

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

86. 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.

87. 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.

88. There are now many invisible people on stage.

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

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

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

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

93. 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.

94. 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.

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

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

97. 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.

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

99. 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.

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