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Audience Quotes

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Audience Quotes

“Writers are egotists. All artists are. They can’t be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the Solitude of the Author’s Life, and lock themselves into cork-lined rooms or droop around in bars in order to whine better. But although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others.”

“Giving free advice is a sad waste of effort. In the first place, no man will act upon it unless he is already inclined to do so. Secondly, when a man lays his case before you, the idea that he is asking your advice is a polite fabrication. He merely is suggesting that he is doing so, while as a fact his real object is to acquaint you with his personal activity. He wants to talk to somebody, being a natural gossip or gadder, and he plays upon your propensity for "giving advice" in order to get an audience.”

“I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.”

“Making a fantastical world real is a bit of a challenge, for sure. When you're on set and you have a green screen you're working with where you'll pretend there's a giant lizard chasing you when there's nothing there. Being shown the images of what the creatures were going to look like and then having to react to them realistically without feeling like you're a crazy person. You kind of have to go for it. In order to sell it to the audience, you can't really hold back.”

“But when you are doing an animated voice, it has to have more energy than usual or it falls flat and doesn't work. For myself, I found that I had to put myself in the same physical or emotional state as Sid, in order to make that voice sound alive and authentic. So if there was a scene in which he was running, I would be running beforehand to sound out of breath. That's important because the audience can tell intuitively if it does not sound real.”

“Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.”

“I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.”