Audiences Quotes

“The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays

“The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“The death of a billionaire is worth more to the media than the lives of a billion poor people.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded--the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.”
― Glenn Gould

“Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.”
― Roger Ebert

“The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it. It is not that we should one day lose our devotion to the things that art addresses: beauty, depth of meaning, good relationships, the appreciation of nature, recognition of the shortness of life, empathy, compassion, and so on. Rather, having imbibed the ideals that art displays, we should fight to attain in reality the things art merely symbolises, however graciously and intently. The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary”
― Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy

“I know all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except when you are telling the truth.”
― Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1, Reader's Edition

“But it’s still a big fight to get the work you’re really excited about onto shelves. And past that, convincing someone to pay you to do the work that you are most excited about is more than a trick, it’s a fucking scam of a magic trick.”
― Brandon Graham

“Everyone likes to reminisce, but not one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Some of the people who hate me love some of the sentences that I have written, until they get to the name of the person to whom the sentences are attributed.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Don't make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don't forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Majina ya vitabu yanapaswa kuchaguliwa kwa mantiki na kwa makini ya hali ya juu mno, kwa sababu ni miongoni mwa vitu vya kwanza watu wanavyoviona na kuvisoma. Watu wakivutiwa na jina la kitabu, au mwandishi; kitu cha pili watakachovutiwa kuangalia ni dibaji, kusudi wasome muhtasari wa kitabu kizima. Kwa hiyo dibaji inapaswa iandikwe kwa mantiki na kwa makini ileile iliyotumika katika kuchagua jina la kitabu. Lengo la jina la kitabu na dibaji ni kuishawishi hadhira kusoma kitabu na kukifurahia.”
― Enock Maregesi

“And I was a Child again, watching the bright World. But the Spell broke when at this Juncture some Gallants jumped from the Pitt onto the Stage and behaved as so many Merry-Andrews among the Actors, which reduced all to Confusion. I laugh'd with them also, for I like to make Merry among the Fallen and there is pleasure to be had in the Observation of the Deformity of Things. Thus when the Play resumed after the Disturbance, it was only to excite my Ridicule with its painted Fictions, wicked Hypocrisies and villainous Customs, all depicted with a little pert Jingle of Words and a rambling kind of Mirth to make the Insipidnesse and Sterility pass. There was no pleasure in seeing it, and nothing to burden the Memory after: like a voluntarie before a Lesson it was absolutely forgotten, nothing to be remembered or repeated.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Visible Man

“My silence never means I don’t have nothing to talk, but it was important who were audiences and what was the topic.”
― Ali Rezavand Zayeri

“Nevertheless, he was caught in its magic and he understood, what he had not known before, that much of the magic of a great theatrical moment is created by the audience itself, a magic impalpable but vividly present, and that what begins as trickery of lights and paint is enlarged and made fine by the response of the beholders. There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.”
― Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus

“The thespian is an impostor, but the paying crowd colludes fully in the fraud as they seek to leave real problems behind to indulge in the fictitious ones of another. Hence adulation towards a performer starts.”
― Stewart Stafford

“General audiences may want escapism but what they need is catharsis.”
― J. Andrew Schrecker

“What we, the audience, bring when we come to the theater - what we might be feeling that day. What might have happened to us. That is a big part of what a play is.”
― Richard Nelson, Sweet and Sad

“I learned this from Robert McKee. A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn't ask himself what's in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for.
The hack condescends to his audience. He thinks he's superior to them. The truth is, he's scared to death of them or, more accurately, scared of being authentic in front of them, scared of writing what he really feels or believes, what he himself thinks is interesting. He's afraid it won't sell. So he tries to anticipate what the market (a telling word) wants, then gives it to them.
In other words, the hack writes hierarchically. He writes what he imagines will play well in the eyes of others. He does not ask himself, What do I myself want to write? What do I think is important? Instead he asks, What's hot, what can I make a deal for?
The hack is like the politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“If you continue to do your job with great seriousness and discipline without complaining about not having a single audience, one day you will have a large audience!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan