Quotes About Audience Writing

#1. I think films are about having a good time, so I don't know that there's a message. The message of a film is always what a critic writes, and the fun of a film or the emotion of a film is what the audience feels.

Steve Martin

#2. At readings, audience members sometimes ask if I keep writing past the two hours if I'm on a roll, but I don't. I figure that if I'm on a roll, it's partially because I know I'm about to stop.

Aimee Bender

#3. 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

#4. Writing is a great way of talking with an endless audience for never-ending time.

Debasish Mridha

#5. When I started writing songs, I was doing it for myself and a small circle of friends. And gradually, over the years, an audience became involved.

Conor Oberst

#6. I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

Robin Wasserman

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. I don't think I ever worry too much about what our target audience is, what we should be releasing. I just write naturally and organically and try to write from the heart.

Martin Gore

#10. 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

#11. I don't know why he [Darren Star] is so good at writing for women. Maybe he just likes women. I'm not quite sure what the magic recipe is, other than he just knows how to entertain an audience, and he knows when to be gooey and sweet, and when to be provocative and naughty.

Sutton Foster

#12. I enjoy writing for both kids and adults, though I think I'm better at children's stories because I was a teacher for so long, and I know that audience well. The process is no different whether I'm writing for children or adults. Really, the elements of making a good story are the same.

Rick Riordan

#13. You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?

Jenkin Lloyd Jones

#14. I think when you write an enigmatic character into a film, you have to have real confidence that the audience are going to go with it.

Gemma Arterton

#15. Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

Don Roff

#16. When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

John Cleese

#17. If I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

Jamaica Kincaid

#18. Once 'Walk Two Moons' received the Newbery Medal, I decided to write full-time. Partly because there seemed to be an audience out there who wanted to read what I wanted to write, and partly because I could now support myself financially through writing.

Sharon Creech

#19. 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

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

J.K. Rowling

#21. 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

#22. Writing is one of the loneliest of the arts; unlike the actor we have no immediate audience and must wait many long months, even years on occasion, for the splatter of applause to reach our ears, if indeed we are not damned by total neglect.

Bryan Forbes

#23. When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.

Tony Kushner

#24. The story world isn't a copy of life as it is. It's life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.

John Truby

#25. There's that process of writing it - then you come out of your room into the sunlight, and you now have to complete the circuit and make the connection finally with the audience.

Aaron Sorkin

#26. I write books to influence people I will never meet. Books increase my audience and my message.

Les Parrott

#27. 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

#28. I like any and all of my associations with music -writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

Duke Ellington

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

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

#30. 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

#31. You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

Joan Didion

#32. 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

#33. Writing for enjoyment of expression does not need an audience of more than one.

Edith Schaeffer

#34. She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her.

Mary Papas

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

Michael Hastings

#36. 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

#37. Without an audience, all your dreams will not come true at all, because you need an audience to write new songs and continue to do music.

Rokia Traore

#38. I am excited about getting back to what I do best and what my audience likes best, I am writing new jokes every day and soon Ill be telling them every night. Just me, one Jew talking and that's it.

Jackie Mason

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

Ann Patchett

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. What shouldn't you do if you're a young playwright? Don't bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it'll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.

Tennessee Williams

#50. 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

#51. A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

Alfred North Whitehead

#52. I don't come up with ideas, they come to me. I write them down and try to convey what's wrong with me to the audience as best I can.

Iliza Shlesinger

#53. I try when I'm writing to leave enough "space" for people to have their own interpretation, and not to direct it toward one conclusion. Then the audience would not be reacting, because they are being preached to or lectured at. I don't have that much to say that I think people should listen to me.

Charlie Kaufman

#54. Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

Tillie Olsen

#55. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#56. Writing, for me, is a combination of objective and subjective approach. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience.

Christopher Nolan

#57. I want to write some books. Books that have nothing to do with music, just some fiction type of books for a whole different audience of people.

Jhene Aiko

#58. A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.

Bill Johnson

#59. 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

#60. What is competent writing? Competent writing is writing that efficiently describes ideas and concepts to an audience, using a grammar that the audience can understand.

John Scalzi

#61. No book or magazine article is for "everyone" so know your audience, then target them with your writing.

W. Terry Whalin

#62. 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.

John Steinbeck

#63. 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

#64. 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.

Mark Bell

#65. I've been writing about Vermont independence for nearly ten years ... and, more often than not, it was for an audience of one.

Thomas Naylor

#66. 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

#67. I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.

Kurt Vonnegut

#68. 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

#69. Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask "How might that happen?" continually, until you have a beginning.

Lucy Prebble

#70. An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

Artie Shaw

#71. For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book.

Rick Riordan

#72. 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

#73. I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.

Louis L'Amour

#74. efforts demonstrated that he had little facility for writing propaganda or even for communicating with a broad audience. No rejoinder was more learned than his treatises, but none was so unreadable.

John Ferling

#75. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Mark Twain

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

Marsha Norman

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

Nick Cohen

#78. 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

#79. I don't write for an audience. I write for myself. And if I imagine an audience at all, it's the characters, but I know that I would keep writing even if no one ever published me again, even if no one ever read me again.

Ursula Hegi

#80. 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.

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Susan Sontag

#84. And I've always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand's message into the writing process. It's like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it.

Jason Bateman

#85. Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

Don Roff

#86. When I write songs I write for myself ... I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

Patti Scialfa

#87. 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

#88. Writing about prayer to a secular audience is tap-dancing on the radio. I want to say, 'Gee whiz, isn't this great,' and have everyone's head cocked like the RCA dog.

Mary Karr

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

Arthur Schopenhauer

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

Christopher Hitchens

#94. 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

#95. 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.

Thomas De Quincey

#96. 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

#97. I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

Bruce Springsteen

#98. Magic : when you create something from the materials around you to astound and make the audience say "Wow." Magic happens on mundane days. It happens when you least expect it. It brings a spark to our drab and monotonous days.

Avijeet Das

#99. Everybody has they're own audience you know what I'm saying. I write rhymes and make music for the people that I fell wanna hear my music. They write rhymes and make music for the people they feel wanna hear they're music.

Bun B.

#100. Every week for me was the same audience, and every week they heckled me. The better I got at comedy, the better the audience was at heckling me. But it helped me with my joke writing.

Felipe Esparza