Lead the audience by the nose to the thought.
—Laurence Olivier (1907–89) English Actor, Producer, Director
The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.
—Michael Faraday (1791–1867) British Physicist, Chemist, Experimentalist
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
If you have any interests you can gain a wider audience for those interests while the goldfish bowl is yours!
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American First Lady, Diplomat, Humanitarian
The great orator always shows a dash of contempt for the opinions of his audience
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American Writer, Publisher, Artist, Philosopher
Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.
—Arthur Miller (1915–2005) American Playwright, Essayist
You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.
—Meryl Streep (b.1949) American Actor
Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you’ve got an audience.
—Diogenes Laertius (f.3rd Century CE) Biographer of the Greek Philosophers
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
—Rebecca West (1892–1983) English Author, Journalist, Literary Critic
When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you’ve written.
—Stephen Sondheim (b.1930) American Musician, Composer, Songwriter
In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don’t want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. 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.
—James Thurber
The only way to win audiences is to tell people about the life and death of Christ. Every other approach is a waste.
—Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) American Catholic Religious Leader, Theologian
PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by pressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.
—Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician
A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) English Writer, Poet
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.
—Orson Welles (1915–85) American Film Director, Actor
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
—Alan Watts (1915–73) British-American Philosopher, Author
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
I’ve spent several years in Hollywood, and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.
—Wilson Mizner (1876–1933) American Playwright, Entrepreneur
If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It’s the ultimate hustle.
—Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American Film, Stage Actor
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
I try to bring the audience’s own drama – tears and laughter they know about – to them.
—Judy Garland (1922–69) American Actress, Singer
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
Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
—John Berger (1926–2017) English Art Critic, Novelist
If you want an audience start a fight.
—Irish Proverb
I still get very scared when I step in front of a live audience.
—Adam Sandler (b.1966) American Actor
It’s the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one’s hand.
—Charles Dickens (1812–70) English Novelist
Not an audience but a habit.
—Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007) Italian-born American Composer
If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
—Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) American Actor, TV Personality
Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist.
—Kenneth Tynan (1927–80) English Theatre Critic, Writer
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
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) American Journalist, Political Commentator, Writer
Don’t be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also
—Billy Wilder (1906–2002) American Filmmaker
Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.
—William O. Douglas (1898–1980) American Judge
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
And who knows? Somewhere out there in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse. I wish him well!
—Barbara Bush (1925–2018) American First Lady
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
God is a comic, playing to an audience that’s afraid to laugh.
—Voltaire (1694–1778) French Philosopher, Author
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
It is not whether you really cry. It’s whether the audience thinks you are crying.
—Ingrid Bergman (1915–82) Swedish Actor
When I tried to branch out into comedy, I didn’t do very well at it, so I went back to doing what I do naturally well, or what the audience expects from me – action pictures.
—Sylvester Stallone (b.1946) American Actor, Screenwriter, Director
Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.
—George Carlin (1937–2008) American Stand-up Comedian
Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
—Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American Self-Help Author
I want people like some of you in this audience to be part of a Clinton administration, not because or in spite of your sexual orientation, but because America needs you
—Bill Clinton (b.1946) American Head of State, Lawyer, Public Speaker