You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad – if you’re indifferent, Endsville.
—Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) American Singer
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience 4000 critics
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.
—Lenny Bruce (1925–66) American Comedian, Writer, Social Critic, Satirist
If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. [You must] reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.
—Jack Lemmon (1925–2001) American Actor, Musician
My basic rule is to speak slowly and simply so that my audience has an opportunity to follow and think about what I am saying.
—Margaret Chase Smith (1897–1995) American Politician
A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) English Writer, Poet
My play was a complete success. The audience was a failure.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.
—Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) Swiss Psychologist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher
If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
—Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) American Actor, TV Personality
When a subject is highly controversial… one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer’s body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.
—Martha Graham (1894–1991) American Choreographer
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
I have no idea what the audience makes of me.
—Keith Richards (b.1943) English Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Actor
My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
—Arthur Miller (1915–2005) American Playwright, Essayist
If you really want to help the American theater, don’t be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.
—Tallulah Bankhead (1902–68) American Actress
I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.
—Lucille Ball (1911–89) American Actor, Comedian, Model
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
—Rebecca West (1892–1983) English Author, Journalist, Literary Critic
An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark—that is critical genius.
—Billy Wilder (1906–2002) American Filmmaker
So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o’clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience.
—Moss Hart (1904–61) American Dramatist, Director
There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
When you can be your own best audience and when your applause is the best applause you know of, you’re in good shape.
—L. Ron Hubbard (1911–86) American Scientologist Religious Leader, Novelist, Author
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) American Journalist, Political Commentator
There are wonderful things in real jazz, the talent for improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
—Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French Painter, Sculptor, Lithographer
The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
—Douglas R. Hofstadter (b.1945) American Cognitive Scientist, Author
Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator, as we adapt our voice and phrase to the distance and character of the ear we speak to
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
A low trick I hate to stoop to is tying and untying my shoelaces. It seems to fascinate audiences probably because so many women in the audience have their shoes off, or wish they did.
—Edward Everett Horton (1886–1970) American Character Actor
Lead the audience by the nose to the thought.
—Laurence Olivier (1907–89) English Actor, Producer, Director
Leave a Reply