Arthur Miller Quotes

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.

The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I'll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.

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

If someone gets up and walks out of the movie, it means it's really affected them.

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.

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.

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.

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.

It doesn't matter what you feel - ultimately, it's what the audience feels. You can finish a scene and think to yourself, 'Oh, God. I was so deep in that moment,' and find it just didn't play. I don't know if I have very good radar about that or not.

I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

When onstage, I always try to take my audience through as many emotions as I possibly can. I want them to go from laughter to tears, be shocked and surprised and walk out the door with a renewed sense of themselves - and maybe a smile.

I like to think if something scares me, then there's a very good chance an audience will feel the same way. The key is creating scenarios that people can relate to.

Audiences want to feel something intense, quickly, without wasting a lot of time.

When you tell a story that you know is having an effect on the audience, that, for me, is the transforming thing.

I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.

It's wonderful to be part of a film that really reaches an audience's mind and an audience's heart.

We can never underestimate the emotionality of 'This Is Us.' Just when you think you don't have another tear to cry, we will find a way. We will find all of your tears. We will dig down deep, and we will yank them out, whether you like it or not.

People have cried at a couple of shows. To think that someone could do that for me... Jesus Christ. That's a crazy sign.

I want to do stories that really move me, that have an audience, and at the end of the day, I want people to feel something when they walk out of the cinema.

You either have to make people love you or you have to make them hate you, it doesn't really matter either way. If you can't bring that emotion out of your audience then you're not going to have them for long.

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

Cinema has to move people.

I discovered that my drag really does speak to people on an emotional level. I also discovered that people are sometimes put off by an intellectual approach to drag.

People like to be moved, that's why they're here listening to you instead of sitting at home with the Shipping Forecast.