You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
I don't sing to people. I sing for them. I told that once to Elvis Presley. He bought it. After that Elvis sang not to but for the audience. A subtle difference.
I worked at NBC and MTV for two years, and it was very interesting to see the comparisons of audiences and the way that I would have to present a story to the two different places.
When you're singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It's happening.
When I'm asked who my audience is, I say someone with an open mind, which is not a vacant one and sometimes a liberal mind is not the same thing as an open one.
The only acting I knew when I was a boy came from Lochgelly. With a double bill, people would live their lives in the cinema. You would even see babies being breastfed in the audience.
A director should not define everything. For me, the movie is a form of a question I pose to the others or to the audience. I want to ask their opinion on my point of view and discuss it with them.
I used to go to open mics in New York when I was starting out, and it was mostly just people who wanted an audience to look at them for eight minutes on a stage.
You never really know until you put the movie in front of an audience. I am a big advocate of screenings, which are getting harder and harder to do nowadays.
Harry Collins was the first magician I ever saw back in 1965 when I was five years old. He was doing a magic show and I was the volunteer from the audience.
Take my wife... please. I'm not saying she's ugly, but when she went to see a horror film, the audience thought she was making a personal appearance.
Although you should never mention your premise in the dialogue of your play, the audience must know what the message is. And whatever it is, you must prove it.
Sometimes, the most daunting thing about performing is making eye contact with your audience, so just look above them and at the corners of the room. Soon, you'll totally forget they're there.
It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know.
Remain humble in your journey as an author and your audience will embrace you. Remain grateful for every publicity opportunity that comes your way, and the media will embrace you.
I felt like I was flying without a net. But once I realized that the audience was my partner, I was flying a jet, because the people would allow me to develop the character on stage.
I don't think too much about the audience when I'm writing... I'm aware that 'Holes' was read by kids as young as 8, up to adults.
You never want your second act or the whole movie to just be this relentless march towards its goal. You want things to take the audience by surprise.
Writing is a lonely pursuit. The only thing working is imagination and hands. The only difference between writing and masturbation is one is presumably intended for a mass audience.
Marvel does a fantastic job about bringing human stories - because you're telling big stories with a heart at the centre of it - and that's what connects all of the characters to our audience members.
I think American audiences are quite interesting in that they can handle almost any amount of violence, but the moment the violence becomes sexual violence it immediately becomes an issue.
