Stephen Sondheim Quotes

You can only be as good as your audience. Sometimes you can be as bad as your audience, but you have to remember you can never be better than them.

It's hard not to be affected by the live audience.

There have been times when I've written something and it goes out and it comes back in a letter from some kid as to what they think about it and I've taken their analysis to heart so much that I have taken up his thing. Writing what my audience is telling me to write.

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

You can't control how an audience responds to something. It's up to them.

Here's the funny thing: Nothing drives a performance like an audience that gives back and even takes over. ECW was a product that will be remembered as much, if not more, for its audience interaction as for the things that happened in the ring.

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.

As far as how much you listen to the audience, you listen to them when they really hate something.

I learn more from the audience than I can from anybody else. Not from what they write on the scorecards, but how they respond to the movie while they're watching it - where they laugh and where they react.

I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.

I find that after a screening, people really want to come and tell you what they feel.

You can feel whether an audience is tightened up and pulled back. Of course the opposite is an audience like we've been having in LA, which is fabulous.

Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.

A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

I'm obsessed with audiences and obsessed with the journey that an audience goes on.

The audience is so important. Because there's something that I might think is super funny, but if it's just not getting the feedback, I have to let it go.

I need to know who the audience are in any particular play. It's no good forgetting that they're there.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

I can't imagine playing a boring gig. Like, a boring audience without reaction, I will play against them.

Sometimes you have to listen to other people, and see what the audiences want. That's what entertaining is about.

Only really good comedies and really good horror movies get a verbal response out of the audience. People will scream. People will laugh.

When I lived in London when I did 'Wicked' there, everyone told me the audiences might be much more reserved, but I found it was completely the opposite. They jumped to their feet sooner, even more enthusiastically than the New York audiences did, and they were just as warm and as enthusiastic and supportive as New York.

We like reactions - a reaction is walking out on us, a reaction is throwing tomatoes at the stage, that's a healthy psychological reaction.

When you put the musical in front of an audience, you get to see how the audience reacts.