Jonathan Agnew Quotes

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

For kids, multitasking electronically is common. But they are totally focused. You can tell a good story, and they listen.

I think readers are always patient. Look at the 'Harry Potter' series. Some have given up on this generation of kids as game and TV addicts, but lots of people spend lots of time patiently reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose. I think reading a comic by comparison is a lot more immediate.

The pictures are created by the listener, with a little help from the broadcaster. The pictures are perfect. If you're showing pictures, different things in that picture can distract from the spoken word.

The radio for these women is like television is for us today, which is really like looking at the radio.

Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.

Television? It's a gateway to writer's block, isn't it?

On TV the people can see it. On radio you've got to create it.

Television is much more collaborative in many ways than prose.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

A lot of actors, you can't get them to shut up. Instead of listening and watching, they're always telling you something.

Film has become a very passive experience, but with theatre, there is a contract made with the audience, where they participate. That's why my parents' puppet theatre was such a special place - people used their imaginations. It's a muscle that needs using.

I always had an ability to listen and give people the space to open up and express themselves, and I was hoping it would translate on TV.

Cinema has a greater impact as it leaves a long lasting memory. Television, on the other hand, is also good but requires a lot of time.

Those who talk loudly are rarely listened to.

If you don't have story to tell the public at large - you have to be able to sort of go listen.

The orator puts off his individuality, and is then most eloquent when most silent. He listens while he speaks, and is a hearer along with his audience.

Part of what I love about television is that my imagination gets to keep going. It doesn't stop.

The photographer and the director are where reality and fantasy meet.

In life we listen to other people. Listen with varying degrees of concentration and attention, right? Actors must learn to listen in a different way.

I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.

You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.