Roger Rosenblatt Quotes

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry.

As long as I can make an audience feel something, I don't care whether it's a good thing or bad thing, just to feel something is important to me.

The audience likes their emotions to be touched. They want to laugh and cry and feel good.

The hardest thing to get is true emotion. I always believe you need to earn that with the audience. You can't just tell them, 'Ok, be sad now.'

I think that with any emotion - fear, love, nervousness - if the actor's feeling it, then the audience feels it.

Actors have to make you believe that it's happening for the first time and all that jazz and make it human and at the same time entertain you.

If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.

In film, there's always this looking for the 'If you lay down and burst into tears, you did a good job.'

I get an audience personally involved in a song - because I'm involved myself. It's not something I do deliberately: I can't help myself. If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel.

Theatre audiences can't be made to think and cry: at best, they can be made to think and laugh, or to feel and cry.

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

Humor is the easiest to achieve; the 'heart' is always the toughest, because you can't tell people to feel a certain way.

The thing that I enjoy about being an actor and the thing that I enjoy about the arts in general is the ability to make the audience feel an emotion that they weren't intending to feel before they went in.

I love to entertain, I love to make people laugh, cry, and move them, perhaps moving them in their lives.

One thing that bugs me in comedy is when somebody does a fake cry, you know, like they fake cry in a comedy. But in a drama they'll really cry. That bugs me.

I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.

I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.

I question what emotion Manilow touches. People are entertained by him. But are they emotionally moved? I don't believe anything that Barry Manilow sings.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

You can get swept away by a musical, but real tears are rare.

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that.

I would like to say that I was inspired to write 'Shiver' by some overwhelming belief in true love, but here's my true confession: I wrote 'Shiver' because I like to make people cry.

I'm singing what I want to sing based on the emotion of what that day feels like. That's what comes out of my mouth and guitar. That impacts people. They know anything can happen.