William Shakespeare Quotes

I think it's almost easier to make people cry than to make people laugh.

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

My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.

We give you this story. It is for the audience to be moved and gut wrenched, not us. It isn't as if we don't go through those real feeling and it isn't as if I don't cry three or four times a night. I usually do.

Combining music, theater and comedy is a new and broader form of expression. In certain combinations you can make people laugh one moment, cry the next, and then be astounded by the beauty of the music.

I've done so much theater, and yet I never had an experience like 'The Normal Heart.' We could feel the reaction of the audience every night. It was visceral.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

It's very difficult to get an audience to be terrified of what's going on. Think about it: You're in a room with so many other people, so for them to be terrified and to care about what's going on on-screen takes a lot of work.

I sent out a tweet, 'Dancing with the Stars' should stop the jibber jabber. They shouldn't make the departure of a dancer so tear jerky because nobody's going to war.

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

One of the things I love about music and making beats is making something and watching someone's reaction, knowing you can do something to manipulate the way people move or act.

[Malipiero's advice to Casanova.] If you wish your audience to cry, you must shed tears yourself, but if you wish to make them laugh you must contrive to look as serious as a judge.

Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.

If I have played my part well, clap your hands, and dismiss me with applause from the stage.

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.

Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded: get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.

There is one way by which a strolling player may be ever secure of success; that is, in our theatrical way of expressing it, to make a great deal of the character. To speak and act as in common life is not playing, nor is it what people come to see; natural speaking, like sweet wine, runs glibly over the palate and scarcely leaves any taste behind it; but being high in a part resembles vinegar, which grates upon the taste, and one feels it while he is drinking.

If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.

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

We're paid to care. That's what actors get their money for. But the main goal is not for the actors to be frustrated at the end of the show, but for the audience to be throwing their shoes at the television set. That's what we're trying for.