Peter Maxwell Davies Quotes

It doesn't matter as long as there's interaction between me and the audience. That's why they come.

We cannot really communicate with our fans.

I think if you can get people to laugh, you can get people to listen.

The big secret in acting is listening to people.

Music is a communication. It's a two-way street. You need people to play to in order to make that connection complete. That's the way we look at it.

I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.

I love connecting with the audience, and there's more ways than one to do that.

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.

If you have something to say then you want someone to pay attention or at least to have the opportunity for them to tell you to shut up and go away.

I like performing. I like partnering with an audience.

Storytelling is about listening in any media.

I feel so much feedback in a very profound way from the 10,000 people who are listening to me, watching me. I just get this deep sense of what works and what doesn't work.

Sometimes you're working with somebody, and you can tell they're just waiting to say their line.

When you read comic material and people aren't laughing how do you know they're listening.

It's a dialogue, not a monologue, and some people don't understand that. Social media is more like a telephone than a television.

I can't imagine working without and audience.

When I'm doing a one-on-one with somebody, I have to speak in a language that that person can understand, using a vocabulary that they instantly get, and I always have to feel my way around to figure that out. It's a lot of fun, and it's also really challenging - challenging in a different way from performing.

Listening to people keeps them entertained.

I would rather do a play because it's instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it's happening or not. Somebody asked me 'What is acting?' And I said, 'Acting is listening.' And if you ain't listening, nobody's listening.

Communication is the key, and it's one thing I had to learn-to talk to the actors. I was so involved with the visual and technical aspects that I would forget about the actors.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Unfortunately, when you're an actor you have to act. It's not like you can sit in your living room, your bedroom, your study or whatever and act with yourself. It requires having somebody to respond to.

Part of the gestation of 'The Wall' was this business of alienation from the audience, and so the interesting thing was, what 'The Wall' eventually became was something that absolutely engaged the audience.