Quotes About Audience

I don't photograph for other people. I love an audience, mind you. Once I've got them there, then I love an audience. Not a big audience, though. I'd rather please ten people I respect than ten million I don't. But I don't play to an audience, I do it for myself.

Making a show is also economics. Because the irony is, or the shame of it is, you cannot create a show instantaneously. It needs to be massaged. You need to see who is relating to who. How is it working with the audience? You need to give it a chance for the audience to find it, because there are so many outlets. And the audience doesn't know where to go.

I do not choose my listeners. What I mean is, I never write for my listeners. I think about my audience, but I am not writing for them. I have something to tell them, but the audience must also put a certain effort into it. But I never wrote for an audience and never will write for one, because you have to give the listener something and he has to make an effort in order to understand certain things.

It's very important that a film that intends to play tricks on the audience... has to play fair with the audience. For me, any time you're going to have a reveal in the film, it's essential that it have been shown to the audience as much as possible. What that means is that some people are going to figure it out very early on. Other people not til the end. Everybody watches the film differently.

I've told Michael Jackson jokes. If you got really technical, you could say those are jokes about child molestation. You could, if you got technical. A lot of this is just selective outrage because honestly, the audience are the ones that tell us that something shouldn't be spoken. The audience lets us know. And I've never, in my almost 30 years of being a comedian, seen a comedian continue to tell a joke that the audience doesn't respond to. I've never seen it.

If your audience is young, it'd be youth culture, if your audience is older, it'd be older people, if it were senior citizens, it'd be senior citizen issues. So you try and hit the target audience.

I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.

I feel that tennis is an art form that is capable of moving the players and the audience - at least a knowledgeable audience-in almost sensual ways. When I'm performing at my absolute best, I think that some of the euphoria I feel must be transmitted to the audience.

Once the audience has to use themselves to cross the distance to the character, that's what's really exciting. That's when it starts to be a discussion between the art form and the audience, and that's fun stuff.

I like what a third man brings. A kind of oblique vision, seeing something in the material that you didn't know was there. As a comedian, I'm always listening to the audience. And in movies, sometimes the only audience you have is the producer and the director. I like having someone else's opinion, especially if you're on the same wavelength.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.

Animation can be a full spectrum of different storytelling techniques and different genres. I think it's sad that there is only one audience that the studios are aiming for and that's the kid audience. It's really tragic that they don't' make films for older people.

Well, I hate it when authors come into a school and they say to kids, 'Write from your heart, only write what you know, and write from your heart.' I hate that because it's useless. I've written over 300 books - not one was written from my heart. Not one. They were all written for an audience, they were all written to entertain a certain audience.

You're in a movie, so you have to think about how something plays. It's not like you're thinking about how an audience is going to react. You're trying to present the story. You're trying to illuminate the lives of these people in the story. So I'm thinking about how my behavior as this character best illuminates what's going on with them in this moment in time. I always say it's sort of the director's job. People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

Pilots are so hard because you have to introduce all these characters, you have to hook an audience, and an audience has such a smaller attention span than maybe they used to have.

Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?

Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.

I think one of the things that is important, for me, though a lot of people would disagree with me, is that you be founded in theater so that you understand what an audience is, what kind of an animal it is and how to play with it. How to have fun with it, how to sympathize with it, all the things that an audience is. I don't think you're going to find that out unless you do theater.

The potential audience seems to be dwindling in the states. I was kind of embarrassed for the band because of the size of the audience.

I've never watched my films with an everyday audience so it was really crazy to watch people clap at the end of my film - with no one there, no actors, no people from the film. It was just a spontaneous reaction, so I thought that was probably the best compliment you could get from an audience.

I know there are people who don't like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated, but my audience has been very good - they don't bother me and when they do contact me it's usually on the nicest possible terms.

The audience too should be respected by being presented with a film as they remember it, and for those who have not seen it, as it was intended to be seen. Anything less is a degradation of the film and its audience.

It's basically how I choose movie roles. Would I like to see this movie? Is this movie important? Why would I do this? And Headhunters is a movie that I would like to see in the cinema. And when it's sold to 50 countries or whatever, for me it's a great deal. I make movies for an audience so if that audience grows, I feel really honoured and thankful for it.

The theatre for me is much more satisfying as an actor because you are working in front of a living, breathing, throbbing, gasping, laughing and hopefully applauding audience. And the immediate connection you get with that audience is very satisfying.

The best way to make friends with an audience is to make them laugh. You don't get people to laugh unless they surrender - surrender their defenses, their hostilities. And once you make an audience laugh, they're with you. And they listen to you if you've got something to say. I have a theory that if you can make them laugh, they're your friends.

A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times.

I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I'm annoying, and a phony.

Financing films that are demanding is a task, in itself. Because people are so afraid of taking any kind of chance, because they're afraid the audience isn't going to respond. But the audience is so hungry for anything that's a bit original, personal, or different.

I never like to play for myself, and that is why I don't own a grand piano. To play for yourself is like looking at yourself in a mirror. I like to practice; that is to work at a task. But to play there must be an audience. New things happen when you play for an audience. You don't know what will occur. You make discoveries with the music, and it is always the first time. It is an exchange, a communion.

As an actor, early on, you learn that the audience is never wrong. And if you think they are wrong, you need to find a different way to make a living. Collectively the audience is smarter than you will ever, ever be.

I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.

I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.

Any time you can create something that gets to a large audience is fantastic. And television still gets you to a huge audience.

But I always communicate with the audience. I never pretend like I'm just in my bedroom making a track. The whole point of doing a gig is, like, a feedback thing between you and the audience.

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up.

Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don't teach people anything new. Instead the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the thirst place.

Well, I think it's important to keep things secretive because what's happened so much is the press competes with each other to put as much information out there as they can and sometimes it can be very damaging to the films to have the stories leaked or certain plot details. I think it's important to have something remain secretive for the audience and something special for the audience so there aren't spoilers all over the internet.

I look at an audience kind of like meeting my in-laws for the first time. You want to be yourself, but you still want to be somebody that they like. When I go on the stage each night, I try my best to outguess my audience.

What looks absolutely fabulous in rehearsal can fall flat in front of an audience. The audience dictates what you do or don't change.

Playing villains is very liberating because unlike the leading man, nothing is expected of you. Leading men have to look good, they have to behave in a certain way, they have to fulfill an audience's expectations. But as a bad guy, you have free license to take the audience by surprise. And that's what audiences want - they want unpredictability from their villains. The villain's job is to subvert it.

You listen to the audience. The audience is wrong individually and always right collectively. If they don't laugh, it isn't funny. If they cough, it isn't interesting. If they walk out, you are in trouble.

I think about all these influences and musical cultures, then the opinion of the audience is of course important, but when I'm working on an album or a new project, I'm not all the time thinking about what the audience will think about it.

I make a great part of my living by traveling and speaking. To me, it's like being a politician, you meet your audience, you constantly see the people and they're getting younger for me which is really, really encouraging. I get older and my audience gets younger. It couldn't be better.

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.

The form came out of the function because it is for the audience that already knows the show, while hoping to get a new audience, too.

If you're a content brand, you have to be in every place your audience is. Sometimes your audience is on the couch and wants to watch a 30-minute show, and sometimes they're checking their Facebook feed and want to see something that's only a minute long.

In theater, it's just you and the audience. It's less of a popularity contest. It's just you and the audience, and they're laughing or they're not laughing, that's the only gauge you really have. But with TV and movies and everything, it's like "Well, did you get a meeting at so-and-so?" and "So-and-so's really hot right now," which is all the stuff I'm probably still not used to.

Being on Oprah? You realize that there are a couple of types of audience members. There are like the cult people in the audience who are just crying before she gets on. And then there are the people who are playing it cool. I definitely was somewhere in the middle.