Tom Petty Quotes

I have a hard time narrowing things down to ten or 12 songs. If I walk off stage in anything less than two hours, it just feels strange. It feels early.

I'm not a comedian who wants to spend far too long on stage.

The problem with the Moodies is not what to play, it's what to leave out! That's always difficult. We stopped having support acts many years ago just because of that. We needed getting on to two hours; there's such a big catalog to call on.

Every play should be 90 minutes. There would be so many more theatre-goers if plays were shorter.

It's good to be playing one and a half hour again. In the States we played like an hour and when you got onstage it felt like all of a sudden you are already done your set. But now, it feels like we are touring again.

It's a strange thing to have a successful television show because if it's too interesting... people don't really pay attention when they watch TV. It has to be good, but not so interesting that you really have to pay attention because people multitask. So, if a show demands your entire attention, it has a tough time making it.

What's interesting to me is the fact that creatively, I can do anything now and people will pay attention, and if I suck, hopefully they will stop paying attention very quickly, but if I'm good, then I have my foot in the door, and people have paid attention, and I did a good job, and people are like, 'Oh, wow!'

Typically, in New York, there are so many comics on a single lineup that you can only do eight minutes.

Why would you have a seven-hour show? The fans are going to be so tired halfway through the show.

You know what the most amazing luxury problem in the world is? When you've got a bunch of hits you have to play. That means the show's going to have to be a little longer.

You have to watch the clock constantly because youre only allowed out of your home for a limited period, and for a busy person, watching the clock and knowing other people are watching the clock is extremely difficult.

One fear setting on filmmakers is that the audience no longer has any patience. They want things to constantly move.

It's awesome to play 1 1/2 -hour shows because it's so much fun, and we enjoy every single minute of it.

When you wrestle on television, you're always fighting for time and the enemy is you're never getting enough of it, you're looking, trying to get more.

It's a little less stressful as a support act, because the headliner carries the majority of the weight. But as a headliner, we get to play a little bit longer.

I like to watch actors while they are acting, how they hold their attention when so many people around are there to distract them. It's difficult.

I've played festivals in Australia. If it's a dance music festival or mainstream festival, there's maybe, like, 10 percent who pay attention to the music.

I like giving the audience a lot of stuff to look at, and rewards for repeated viewings and paying attention.

Television is on a small screen, inside someone's living room, so you have to grab their attention while they are having dinner or cooking or doing something else.

On every show I've ever done, one of the first network notes is, 'You have to put a time clock on this thing.'

In an outdoor environment, you need to be more energetic. The attention of the crowd begins to wander - not like an indoor concert where the audience attention is riveted on to the stage.

There was a lot of times when I was busking there were a lot of people in your face, like 'More, more! Go again, again, again!'... People were so used to be able to swipe to see something different to entertain themselves that the patience had diminished.

A touring comic's typical day roughly amounts to an hour of being laughed at and 20 minutes of being photographed. The other 22 hours and 40 minutes are spent in silence.

People have a very short attention span when it comes to television, but nobody forgets the movie you do.

Attention spans are so limited and ticket prices so high. We're anyway in a business of manipulating emotions. But each film needs to be positioned truthfully so that people don't feel cheated.