We are all actors, set on the stage of the world, as the curtains open we put on our best performance to this audience of life.

I think comedy as an art involves the audience as a participant as much as is involves the artist.

When art sets racism in the past, no matter how good it is, it allows white people in the audience (and others) to say to themselves Wow! That racism sure was bad way back then! It's what happens when people go see 12 Years a Slave. My response is always, Yeah, you wanna know another time when racism was bad? Earlier today.

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

As long as your work remains unwritten in your head, it has no effect on anyone. Except you. And not in a good way. Once you let your idea out of the hermetically sealed vault of your brain and out into the fresh air, it will immediately start to evolve. The minute you get it down on a piece of paper, it will change.And once you let it out of the house — once someone else gets to experience it — everything is changed.You are changed. The project is changed. The audience is changed.That's the alchemy of art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

It s the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the insanities we commit.

The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.

The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.

If one talks to more than four people, it is an audience; and one cannot really think or exchange thoughts with an audience.

Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is fifty percent of the performance.