The audience is fifty percent of the performance.
Audience Quotes
As with most audiences when there is a live celebrity on stage, our laughter is performative, disproportionate, and noncontextual: a semaphoric ass kiss across the footlights. Here we are, famous person! We get you!
The square people think I’m too hip, and the hip people think I’m too square.
An audience is like a broad. If you’re indifferent, Endsville.
(A woman cornered him and said in a treacly, gushing voice: “Doesn’t it thrill you, Mr. Churchill, to know that every time you make a speech the hall is packed to overflowing?”) “It is quite flattering,” Mr. Churchill replied, “but whenever I feel this way I always remember that if instead of making a political […]
When Dr. Edith Sitwell and her brother, Sir Osbert Sitwell, were in Hollywood, they gave a reading of their poems. Sir Osbert suddenly turned to the audience and asked: “Can you hear me?” One man answered: “No.” Sir Osbert replied: “Then pay a little more attention.”
If the speaker won’t boil it down, the audience must sweat it out.
We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever renewed audiences before to reenact an ideal version of their lives.
Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping around the camp-fire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or wooly-rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience […]
An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.
