Russell Banks Quotes

You look out in our audiences, you don't see a sea of white-haired people. You see a lot of younger people.

My audiences get younger all the time.

I've grown up with my audience; they're my age or older. Not a lot of kids are coming to see me.

I'm not in the teenybopper bracket, and I'm not in the 30-plus bracket. The fan response has been really widespread, age-wise.

I've become 40, my audience is partly the same age.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'

Younger customers are the future, but older customers have the money. So you need both: one for the present, and the other for the future.

I keep saying, the older I get, the younger my audience gets. Because 'Wicked' and 'Rent' and 'Glee,' each one was a young audience, so it's a great thing to have, so then you know that as they get older and have kids, they'll maybe still buy tickets to my shows when I'm 80 and in Vegas!

There is this idea that appealing to youth is the only way forward. But that is no longer the case. Youth is not everything. Now we have all the baby-boomers in their 60s, like me, who are actively engaged in life - we're not retiring, we're not just being put out to grass once we hit 60.

Keep in mind that in 1985, I had a potential readership of over 50 million Americans. At that time, a good portion of those were under 30.

I don't care about age very much.

Maybe it will be a great thing when the Baby Boomers finally die out. In real life, it's not a matter of the good guys or the bad guys. Rather, it's big numbers and small numbers that do the counting.

My audience has lots of people between 20 and 35, but there are always a few 60-year-olds, and it makes me happier than if everyone was 22.

I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.

When I look out at the audience at some of our shows, I think we are reaching a younger audience... I see lots of people in their 30s and 40s, but I also see a lot of people in their young and middle teens, and that's definitely reassuring.

Everyone wants something that'll appeal to, like, 13-year-olds to 18-year-olds. Especially working in television and trying to pitch shows, they're like, 'We definitely want something that a 14-year-old will be, like, super-psyched about.' And I'm like, 'I don't know if my reality is appealing to a 14-year-old.'

Demographics show that we are entering a battle between young and old. I call it the 'Age War.' The young want to hang onto their money to grow their families, businesses, and wealth. The old want the tax and investment dollars of the young to sustain their old age.

Marketing is a very good thing, but it shouldn't control everything. It should be the tool, not that which dictates.

Every time an article is written about me or any of my contemporaries who's had the fortune and discipline to look good at a certain age, I am struck by the tone of astonishment, and the certainty that something is being done secretively to beat the devil.

Of course it's true: the public want to see young people - young people are the people who go to the cinema. It's a sad fact of life, but you've got to accept it and not whine about it.

Rock isn't a young music anymore. I don't think it's necessarily even a youth-oriented music.

I believe that, no matter how old you are, a woman can look amazing.

My parents aren't the demographic for a lot of things I do. If I did a stand-up show, and I saw 62-year-old Pakistanis in the crowd, I'd be like, 'I'm gonna bomb.'

'Warm Bodies' - I was contractually obligated to deliver a PG-13 movie. But, like, I wanted it to be PG-13 because it's for younger people, and I don't want them not to be able to see it. I mean, you have to kind of think about the marketplace as well.

I hate when books are written from the wrong perspective; when they're written by adults for tweenagers. Like, do you truly remember what it's like to be 12? No, not really.