An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark — that is critical genius.
Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves, whistle and dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience.
Every crowd has a silver lining.
I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.
I never let them cough. They wouldn't dare.
I'm not here for your amusement. You're here for mine.
It is because the public are a mass — inert, obtuse, and passive — that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are — and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence.
It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one's hand.
It's easier to find a new audience than to write a new speech.
It's the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.
Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that Oedipus or Berenice or Hamlet or The Three Sisters performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives them a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all.
My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners.
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater. Every technique learned by the actor, every curtain, every flat on the stage, every careful analysis by the director, every coordinated scene, is for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, our evaluators, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life.
When I'm talking to a large audience, I imagine that I'm talking to a single person.
Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.