Quotes About Audience In Writing

#1. You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.

Brenda Ueland

#2. I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists' relationship is essentially with their work - not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#3. The thing about having an audience right there laughing is that critics can write what they want, but the proof is right there in front of you.

Chris Rock

#4. In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels.

Gerald Clarke

#5. I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series.

Sarah Mlynowski

#6. 'Weedflower' was already in the copyediting phase when I heard about the Newbery award, so it didn't really influence my writing of that book, but since then, I have become more aware of having an audience.

Cynthia Kadohata

#7. I don't think of writing my poems for China or for the world. I mainly think of a small audience of friends and people I know. I am writing for that small group. They are not necessarily going to be able to read it, but that's what I have in mind when I write.

Bei Dao

#8. Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.

Malcolm Gladwell

#9. In a novel, language is your principal tool, you try to build pictures in the mind of the reader. When you write a screenplay, the language is just a transition, the final goal is a picture on the screen, it's the only thing the audience sees.

Philippe Claudel

#10. When I was first starting out, I drove myself around the country in my Honda Civic, playing anywhere that would have me. This is a chance to strip the songs down to their roots and let the audience hear them the way I write them.

Eric Hutchinson

#11. It was the idea of writing with a specific audience in mind or a specific age of reader that scared me off.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#12. I don't think you ever write a song with any intention except the song's about such and such per say ... we've never written a song and thought 'oh it'd be great if in this part this happened in the audience'.

Al Barr

#13. It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.

Robertson Davies

#14. We are born at the rise of the curtain and we die with its fall, and every night in the presence of our patrons we write our new creation, and every night it is blotted out forever; and of what use is it to say to audience or to critic, 'Ah, but you should have seen me last Tuesday?'

Micheal Mac Liammoir

#15. What's interesting to me is how many vampire/urban fantasy authors are writing young adult series as well, often set in the same world as their adult books, but focused on a younger audience.

Carrie Vaughn

#16. Never try to fit a target audience. Write what is true to the characters in their settings and the audience will find you.

Alex Borstein

#17. There are always struggles in writing. Anyone who denies this is either lying to themselves or you. Or they're not faithful to their audience.

Phoenix Elvis Nicholson

#18. Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.

Art Buchwald

#19. I just want to write books or give talks which, if I were in the audience or I were the reader, I would appreciate.

Marianne Williamson

#20. I don't write with any audience in mind. I just write. I take a chance on the audience. That's what I did originally, and I think it's worked
in the sense that I find there is an audience.

Harold Pinter

#21. Improvisation is just writing in front of an audience.

Carl Reiner

#22. I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

Umberto Eco

#23. Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

#24. In writing, the connection between storyteller and audience is just as important. By using some subtle devices, a narrator can reach out to the reader and say, 'We're in this together.'

Constance Hale

#25. If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on two areas learning to write and to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively.

Gerald R. Ford

#26. I love nothing more than to perform my songs in front of a live audience. And whatever I'm doing is driven toward finding or writing songs and putting out hit songs that drive people coming to see me live. Because, at the end of the day, that's what I enjoy the most.

Luke Bryan

#27. But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

Lawrence Hill

#28. The centerpiece of 'Law and Order' is the crime, and it starts with the writing. There's a beginning, a middle and an end. It allows the audience to watch any given episode and can drop right in and not feel lost. I think the stark, raw structure has a lot to do with its longevity.

Danny Pino

#29. At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.

Rita Dove

#30. I don't think I would ever inch my way up to Y.A. That audience is very well served. There are a lot of wonderful writers writing for Y.A. I feel like I'm in the right place.

Rick Riordan

#31. Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.

Israel Horovitz

#32. I seek to take my audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride, a journey of laughter and tears and every sentiment in between.

Marc Royston

#33. The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It's a soothing falsity.

David Mamet

#34. Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.

Stephen Graham Jones

#35. You can't stumble into an adventure. An artist must dance, not walk, in order to inspire their audience. This patient audience who has witnessed all that you've ever performed. So don't be shy. Just dance. Set this scene into motion.

F.K. Preston

#36. I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.

G. Willow Wilson

#37. Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical. You've got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That's how they know you're not kidding.

Bruce Springsteen

#38. When you're writing, don't forget to keep your favorite audience in mind
you.

Lori Lesko

#39. Any time a beloved character is killed off, it affects the audience in a very powerful way, especially in a series.

Darynda Jones

#40. There have been times when I've written something and it goes out and it comes back in a letter from some kid as to what they think about it and I've taken their analysis to heart so much that I have taken up his thing. Writing what my audience is telling me to write.

David Bowie

#41. I don't know if I could write ten easy ways to connect with an audience. I know you have to believe in what you're doing, you have to believe in your music, believe in your ability, believe that what you're doing is honest and true and real.

Ramsey Lewis

#42. I'm still a fanboy geek. I always will be. In many ways, if my work still resonates with the audience, it's because I'm still writing from the point of view of the fan, so I'm geeked out constantly.

Len Wein

#43. the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things.

Michael Chabon

#44. Storytellers think they're writing for the audience. They're writing, in a way, to hurt the audience.

Chuck Wendig

#45. You have to keep your audience in your mind; if you're writing stuff that you know nobody's going to care about then you should rethink what you're doing!

Paullina Simons

#46. Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

Flannery O'Connor

#47. When I'm writing, I'm constantly thinking about myself, because it's the only experience I have to draw on. And I don't see an exact reflection of myself in every face in the audience, but I know that my songs have validity to them, and that's why the fans are there.

Chester Bennington

#48. I have had an inordinate and painful concern for the audience in my writing career.

Marsha Norman

#49. Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Henry David Thoreau

#50. It's funny when you start writing an album and then recording - the songs begin to take on a spirit of their own. Once you start to perform it live, this happens even more so than in the studio. They really start to develop a personality that takes shape over time with the audience.

Matt Shultz

#51. In truth, I never consider the audience for whom I'm writing. I just write what I want to write.

J.K. Rowling

#52. In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

Lionel Shriver

#53. My goal in writing for teens and tweens is to help my audience feel inspired and empowered today, to find their voice today, to believe that they can truly design the life of their dreams ... today. I mean seriously ... why wait?

Deborah Reber

#54. Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.

Nick Cohen

#55. There are so many burning issues to be dealt with that it's completely understandable and natural that a character is struggling with these issues themselves. In that struggle, you inform the audience. The thing about this writing is that it's very easy to learn. Good writing always is.

Colm Meaney

#56. I'm close to my audience. I think I have more tools in my box than other guys who might try it. Also, I know how to do this stuff. I know how to write and shoot and edit. I'm technically adept and that helped with the website. You need a big skill set.

Louis C.K.

#57. When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

James Arthur

#58. For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

Louis Menand

#59. When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.

Judy Blume

#60. When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

John C. Bean

#61. When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.

Salman Rushdie

#62. It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.

Helen Oyeyemi

#63. I think writing is really a process of communication ... It's the sense of being in contact with people who are part of a particular audience that really makes a difference to me in writing.

Sherley Anne Williams

#64. If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.

Matt Damon

#65. I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders.

Jeff Kinney

#66. Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.

John Truby

#67. Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.

Paul Krugman

#68. To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

Maxine Kumin

#69. With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.

Irvin D. Yalom

#70. Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.

David Gerrold

#71. There is a method to the madness of James Patterson's success. Co-writing with him is a terrific learning experience, particularly in the art of crafting a perfect thriller. The collaboration also gives me an opportunity to access a wider global audience.

Ashwin Sanghi

#72. I don't think any of us are careful enough about emails. When you are writing an email, you should imagine yourself in an auditorium speaking to 5,000 people, with your mother and grandmother in the audience, and it is being broadcast on CNN.

Toby Emmerich

#73. Some celebrities, it's interesting, because they're fantastic playing a character when somebody is writing the lines for them, and they're amazing actors, but they're not as comfortable on television in front of a live audience and just having a conversation and being themselves.

Ellen DeGeneres

#74. An artist without an audience is like a jar without jelly. There doesn't always need to be much jelly in the jar, nevertheless a jar without jelly would feel jealous and empty.

Kevin Focke

#75. One thing we do really well on Archer and one thing I've always tried to do in my comedy and my writing and my podcast is to never speak down to my audience.

Aisha Tyler

#76. I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

Ethan Hawke

#77. In today's time, writing stuff that actually happened is touch-and-go, because you don't want to be too personal. If you are, then it probably won't relate to a mass audience. A lot of times you have to make it sound like it's about everybody else, but you really went through it.

Josh Turner

#78. There's a certain freedom in writing when you don't know if you'll ever have an audience.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

#79. You write music for yourself and if you just open that door and let people in, the audience is going to grow and it's going to become more accessible.

Yukimi Nagano

#80. I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.

Jim Crace

#81. When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence.

Michael Hastings

#82. When I write a play, my whole intent at bottom is to get the audience to be in the cast, to get that audience on stage with the actors and to get them thoroughly involved in what's going on.

Jules Feiffer

#83. In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author.

John Locke

#84. I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.

Mike Birbiglia

#85. I think in the old days, films really went for the shock, with the blood and guts, but movies are getting better. The writing and directing have improved a lot, because the audience demands it.

Claudia Christian

#86. The melodies were melodies that anybody could sing or hum or whistle. And the words were just about that simple. I think the stories Hank told in his song fit so many people. Nearly everybody in the audience acted as if Hank were singin to them alone.

Don Helms

#87. My comics have changed so much over the years, in the writing, in art style, sometimes incrementally, sometimes quite suddenly. So I've cultivated an audience who will go along with me because they trust me.

John Allison

#88. I didn't write with a target audience in mind. What excited me was how much I would enjoy writing about Harry. I never thought about writing for children - children's books chose me. I think if it is a good book anyone will read it.

J.K. Rowling

#89. Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.

Rebecca Solnit

#90. The golden rule would be to write a great, authentic song that is well produced and it will find its home. The audience can feel whether or not the artist is being genuine in their music. It's up to the artist to have the courage to reveal their truth through their songs.

Wendy Starland

#91. The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it's almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject.

Pankaj Mishra

#92. I always write with an audience in mind. If I feel that [connection] coming back at me then I feel like I'm doing my job. That's why people come to my music - for some emotional experience or a perspective, either on their own lives, or on the world that they're living in.

Bruce Springsteen

#93. I think artists are scared to have same-gendered pronouns in their writing, and I don't think it's because they're scared to be out, because gay artists are visible, but they don't want to alienate an audience.

Mary Lambert