#Audience Quotes

“I play for high stakes and given an audience - there is no act too daring or too noble.”

“I would tell myself that I was about to address the largest mass assembly of idiots ever gathered in the history of mankind.”

“A comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious.”

“The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.”

“He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.”

“When we are high and airy hundreds sayThat if we hold that flight they'll leave the place,While those same hundreds mock another dayBecause we have made our art of common things.”

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.”

“You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.”

“Adults are interested if you don't play down to the little 2 or 3 year olds or talk down. I don't believe in talking down to children. I don't believe in talking down to any certain segment. I like to kind of just talk in a general way to the audience. Children are always reaching.”

“Over at our place, we’re sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children. But just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us, that maybe the world has made us forget.”

“I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty.”

“We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public.”

“Women are the best judges of anything we turn out. Their taste is very important. They are the theatergoers; they are the ones who drag the men in. If the women like it, to heck with the men.”

“I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with "expressing" myself with obscure creative impressions.”

“There is nothing wrong with good schmaltz, nothing wrong with good heart... The critics think I'm kind of corny. Well, I am corny. As long as people respond to it, I'm okay.”

“To know whom to write for is to know how to write.”

“If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere -- probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations -- many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.”

“The story man must see clearly in his own mind how every piece of business will be put over. He should feel every expression, every reaction. He get far enough from his story to take a second look at it... to see whether there is any dead phase... to see whether the personalities are going to be interesting and appealing to the audience. He should also try to see that the things that his characters are doing are of an interesting nature.”

“Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.”

“I like my films to influence the audience. Even if it means tripping their aged grandparents with a cane when they get home.”

“I don't want to please everybody. I'd get a little worried if I did something and everybody was pleased with it.”

“We seem to know when to 'tap the heart.' Others have hit the intellect. We can hit them in all emotional way. Those who appeal to the intellect only appeal to a very limited group. The real thing behind this is: we are in the motion picture business, only we are drawing them instead of photographing them.”

“I don't believe in talking down to children. I don't believe in talking down to any certain segment.”

“If I can't find a theme, I can't make a film anyone else will feel. I can't laugh at intellectual humor. I'm just corny enough to like to have a story hit me over the heart.”

“If I depended on critics and children to make a living I'd grow broke.”

“I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.”

“My audience has really become a very diverse group of people. It's not just 15-year-old girls. That's kind of what allows me to write from all the different places I want to write from.”

“One of the things I like about when I tour sometimes is that occasionally you'll see a dad there with his 12-year-old son and they're both enjoying it.”

“It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.”

“Only one in four jokes ever works, and I still can't predict what people will laugh at.”

“When you walk out onstage in front of 65,000 people, it can bring you to tears.”

“When I hear that high-pitched sound of all those people screaming together, it's like, I want to get on stage right now. It's the most amazing feeling.”

“A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.”

“An actor knows two important things - to be honest in what he is doing and to be in touch with the audience. That's not bad advice for a politician either.”

“I'm gonna see 'Mission Impossible' Part 9 because I like Tom Cruise movies! But just because the box office has that one receipt from the ticket I purchased, doesn't mean it represents someone who liked it.”

“I love kids, but they are a tough audience.”

“People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the right reasons. It's that last twenty-five percent that worries me.”

“I was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, Bahrain. The first year I went pretty much by myself. Then I went with General [Richard] Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The shows and audiences were amazing. You'll never get a better group of people.”

“When you have a great audience, you can just keep going and finding new things.”

“write what readers want to read, which isn’t necessarily what you want to write.”

“If I say a joke and the audience laughs it makes me feel good.”

“I get a lot of return business. I think it's all those years I put in traveling around the country; people saw me before and had a good time so they want to see me again.”

“I'm not a person who likes authority. I just love the fact that it's up to me, and I go straight to the audience.”

“I like whomever to come to my shows. I want people who want to see me to come see me. I don't want to force people. I don't want it to feel like a job!”

“The singer alone does not make a song, there has to be someone who hears. -Broken Song”

“It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”

“Low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself.”

“I really don't know what exactly all the songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings and when I hear them I think, 'That's really a better meaning than I thought, and perfectly valid, given the words that exist.' So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different meanings, and they apply them, and they might be more powerful than the ones I'm thinking.”

“The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.”

“I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.”