“People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people - a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?” PeopleKnowsWritingMayBookSilenceAudienceKnow HowStrangeReaderConversationOneselfStrangerEncountersUnseenWondrousCorrectingAnthropologistsPuzzling Book:Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“As you get older, as a comedian, and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.” LongSilenceAudienceLaughingStageHugeComfortableJokesReactionsComedianCherish Author:Patton Oswalt
“Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.” MindEndsUseReadingVoiceSilenceAudiencePoetActressesTricksDramaticToneRomeAgonyHis LoveLecturesAbsentShakingGrimLecturerYaleMonologuesRuth Author:Louis Auchincloss
“Silence means they [the audience] are paying attention. Even if I drop bombs and they're dead quiet, it's still okay. If they start talking, that's when you've lost them.” IfsMeanStillsLostAttentionSilenceTalkingAudienceQuietOkayPay AttentionBombs Author:Anthony Jeselnik
“An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.” HandsSilenceAudienceThousandSittingTwenties Book:The Mask of Apollo Source: The Mask of Apollo