“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.”— Robert McKee
“Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.”— Ezra Pound
“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
“Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded–the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]”— Chuck Palahniuk
“I have no rules. For me, it’s a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You’re looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance and want it to be something you can see a second time, and then I’d like it to be something you can see 10 years later, and it becomes a different movie, because you’re a different person. So that means I want it to be deep, not in a pretentious way, but I guess I can say I am pretentious in that I pretend. I have aspirations that the movie should trigger off a lot of complex responses.”— David Cronenberg
“Choose your audience wisely, for its not your performance that varies but their response is what matters!”— Ramana Pemmaraju
“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.”— Don DeLillo
“My friends are always conscious of what people think of them. As though life is something that has an audience.”— Caroline Green
“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention,A kingdom for a stage, princes to actAnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fireCrouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,The flat unraised spirits that have daredOn this unworthy scaffold to bring forthSo great an object: can this cockpit holdThe vasty fields of France? or may we cramWithin this wooden O the very casquesThat did affright the air at Agincourt?O, pardon! since a crooked figure mayAttest in little place a million;And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,On your imaginary forces work.Suppose within the girdle of these wallsAre now confined two mighty monarchies,Whose high upreared and abutting frontsThe perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;Into a thousand parts divide on man,And make imaginary puissance;Think when we talk of horses, that you see themPrinting their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,Turning the accomplishment of many yearsInto an hour-glass: for the which supply,Admit me Chorus to this history;Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.”— William Shakespeare
“This is the responsibility we all owe to ourselves– that the purpose of our existence be to positively affect others with our gift and this does not begin when we feel we have become “something”. It begins when we decide to pick our gift and align it with it’s purpose.”— Chinonye J. Chidolue
“Whatever you do for the purpose of impacting on others, no matter how little you think it to be or how little your audience may seem, it not only grows but it leaves a lifetime effect which sets you up on greater grounds of success more than you ever anticipated.”— Chinonye J. Chidolue
“To tell you the truth, though, I still haven’t made up my mind whether I shall publish at all. Tastes differ so widely, and some people are so humourless, so uncharitable, and so absurdly wrong-headed, that one would probably do far better to relax and enjoy life than worry oneself to death trying to instruct or entertain a public which will only despise one’s efforts, or at least feel no gratitude for them.”— Thomas More
“A crowd of men stood in front of them. Of all ages, with expressions of sex-wonder in their eyes, gazing curiously as men who cannot solve a mystery that populates graveyards and through the ages has sent poets, popes, kings and fools to the junk heap.”— Jim Tully
“If you have to explain your sense of humor, then you are performing for the wrong crowd.”— Shannon L. Alder
“When I write I like to give equal justice to lyrics, too. I want the song to have meaning for me so I can make it have meaning for the audience.”— Oliver
“LIZZ WINSTEAD Instead of Jon playing a character—the news anchor, one of the derelicts in a derelict world of media—Jon made a creative decision to take the show in the direction of the correspondents presenting the idiocy, and then Jon is the person who calls out the idiocy with the eloquence that the viewer wishes they had. And he did it in a way that’s not condescending, it’s not smug. It’s funny, it’s emotional, it’s calling out bullshit. So Jon became the voice of the audience.”— Chris Smith
“Most of the people in the audience were white and old. They had the gaunt look of people who have seen all the important movies and can now only look forward to reruns.”— Karan Mahajan
“But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.”— Thomas de Quincey
“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.”— John Steinbeck
“The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of theaudience.”— Chuck Palahniuk