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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.
—Greil Marcus (b.1945) American Music Journalist, Cultural Critic
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
A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
—George Will (b.1941) American Columnist, Journalist, Writer
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
By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more and not merely to spend our feelings.
—Arthur Miller (1915–2005) American Playwright, Essayist
I try to do something the audience might not have seen before. Like if I’m gonna kiss a girl I wanna kiss her like a girl has never been kissed. Like maybe I would kick her legs out from under her and catch her right before she hits the ground and then kiss her.
—Jim Carrey (b.1962) Canadian Actor, Comedian
If you really want to help the American theater, don’t be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.
—Tallulah Bankhead (1902–68) American Actress
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
—Walt Whitman (1819–92) American Poet, Essayist, Journalist, American, Poet, Essayist, Journalist
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
In the world’s audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight.
—Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali Poet, Polymath
The first time I got up in front of an audience was terror, abject terror, which continued for another four or five years. There still is, a little bit.
—Bob Newhart (b.1929) American Comedian, Actor, TV Personality, Film Personality
I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
It is not whether you really cry. It’s whether the audience thinks you are crying.
—Ingrid Bergman (1915–82) Swedish Actor
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
—Rebecca West (1892–1983) English Author, Journalist, Literary Critic
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.
—Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) English Satirist, Novelist, Author
Not an audience but a habit.
—Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007) Italian-born American Composer
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
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
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
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German Philosopher
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
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience 4000 critics
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist