Audience Quotes

The greatest challenge on the Web in the twenty-first century is to connect with your target audience in a way that enriches both them and you.

~ David Amerland

Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

~ Ezra Pound

Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.

~ Ayi Kwei Armah

Anyone can perform good deeds for an audience, the best among us do their greatest work when no one is present to bear witness.

~ Ken Poirot

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

~ Robert Mckee

I'm always trying to gain and keep the audience's respect. I always want them to know that the show doesn't think they're stupid for watching.

~ Dan Harmon

To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from What information do I need to convey? to What questions do I want my audience to ask?

~ Chip Heath

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

~ John C. Bean

I'm very aware we are the first generation ever to have such incredible opportunities to express ourselves publicly to a worldwide audience.

~ Sara Sheridan

As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.

~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.

~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

Between Monday and Saturday men make an audience. On Sunday, they make a congregation.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nothing unleashes curiosity in an audience like good storytelling. Nothing inspires storytelling, in turn, like the results of curiosity.

~ Brian Grazer

I'm a master of story. Almost a living fiction myself, so resilient am I! Spider-Man beats me down, I rise! Daredevil imprisons me, I escape! That's because stories have power! He who controls the narrative controls the audience, and you're all the audience, every one of you. As they say, the world's a stage...

~ Mark Waid

Storytellers think they're writing for the audience. They're writing, in a way, to hurt the audience.

~ Chuck Wendig

Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

~ Don Roff

There’s nothing that makes an artist more beloved than the audience pitying him because his work comes at a price they would never pay.

~ Rafael Yglesias

Writing is a great way of talking with an endless audience for never-ending time.

~ Debasish Mridha

I write for pages,get lost in the mezzaninehidden from stages.

~ Kristen Henderson

There is never a bad joke, it's adressing to a wrong audience that makes it look bad!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.

~ Peter Watson

I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.

~ Dan Harmon

You can't tell the audience — well, you can, but I don't like to tell the audience — that anything they're watching doesn't matter.

~ Dan Harmon

I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.

~ Frank Capra

If we really exist merely to fulfill God’s plan: then life is a television drama; with God being the scriptwriter, the director, and, the audience.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When you're writing, don't forget to keep your favorite audience in mind--you.

~ Lori Lesko

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.

~ David Byrne

Everyone likes to reminisce, but not one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

~ Liu Cixin

There is no such thing as an “independent artist”. All artists are essentially co-dependent of the audience.

~ Natasha Tsakos

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

~ Harley King

Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.

~ Krzysztof Kieślowski

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

~ Walter Benjamin

My wit is only as stupid as the audience.

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

The meaning you apply to what has happened to you is your decision. There will be critics that have their version, but God didn’t call them to be your audience, someone else did.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Assuming Sandberg's advice is completely useless for working-class women is just as shortsighted as claiming her advice needs to be completely applicable to all women. And let’s be frank: if Sandberg chose to offer career advice for working-class women, a group she clearly knows little about, she would have been just as harshly criticized for overstepping her bounds.

~ Roxane Gay

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

If you go on stage with the wrong attitude, or something in your performance is off, you can lose an audience in the first minute. That first minute is crucial.

~ Allan Carr

Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere.

~ Bill Veeck

Second, this epic tale allows the audience to actually listen to the Native Americans and receive their wisdom. Spielberg conveys the respect for Native Americans that is normally lacking in Western films.

~ Beau Bridges