Steve Zissis Quotes

I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment. From a filmmaker's standpoint, that's so rare and pure in a way that I'm sure is way more complicated than it appears.

Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone.

Television has some lovely aspects to it - and some ghastly aspects - but the theater itself was a wonderful invention.

When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.

I've always had this rule of thumb: If you have fun making it, then someone will have fun watching it.

The one thing I'm proud of as a filmmaker is that people are entitled not to like my films - that's the privilege of the public - but I think I have my own imprint.

I'll sing as long as people want to hear me, and I'll be able to sing as long as I'm alive.

It's nice to get the feedback from a theater audience. It's a gas.

The first tour an artist does is a strange one... because you can never tell how the audience is going to react.

Playing live is great, but it's not a creative thing, really. It's a reproductive thing.

I just see clothing as cloth, and I see it as art, and I see it as a way to express yourself artistically in this world.

I love to create something new every night onstage; that makes a big difference.

The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...]

If you're someone who's making film or TV or music, or any kind of art form now, there's a billion outlets and they all have an opinion.

I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.

I have to paint fast on television because of the limited time, but I don't want people to see what I'm showing them as work, something to worry and fret over. This is supposed to be fun.

Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

The way a dancer can bring the crowd to its feet with a drawn-out, well-executed pirouette is the excitement I wanted to capture with this design.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

The key to attempting to create art in some aspect is also knowing that it will turn some people off.

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.

Chandresh relishes reactions. Genuine reactions, not mere polite applause. He often values the reactions over the show itself. A show without an audience is nothing, after all. In the response of the audience, that is where the power of performance lives.

In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.

The stage is the opposite: you are talking loud so you can project to the back row and you know the whole play. In a movie, you are scene-to-scene; you only know the purpose of that scene. On the stage, that is artistic science. It is real, it is loving, it is truthfully you. It is two different formulas to make two different art pieces, but it is all about truth.

The live show allows me to transcend myself, because it's not about me anymore. The writing process is very much about me but then the live show is not. They feel really different.