Sinclair Lewis Quotes

You go to a festival, you know you're not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I've made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

There's a pressure regardless of that to do a good show.

I think the challenge is going out in front of a paying audience with absolutely nothing and trying to entertain them for two hours. Thankfully, I only think about that right before we go on, and then once we're out there, everything's fine.

The truth of it is that people are not going to want to go to improvisational theater if it's not funny. You can succeed in doing all the things you're supposed to do - be truthful to scene - and if it's not funny, I'm telling you that no one's gonna care.

If you talk in a way that is too dissimilar to the character, when people are showing up to see you talk about the show, often it seems like it's jarring to them.

After all these years, I still get nervous in front of people. I can't help it. I just, you know, I want it to be a good show, and I want people to get their money's worth.

I couldn't deliver a joke if you asked me to. It would have to be live and spontaneous. And that's what I was able to have in New York, at 9 o'clock in the morning, and people all over the country seemed to respond to it.

People want a certain amount of respect when they watch a film: it should be worth of their time.

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

I don't do stand-up anymore.

I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.

When people watch good films they want other films to be of that calibre as well particularly when you cater to the same core audience.

Once I reached my 40s, I thought to myself that if I'm going to play live now, I need to really mean this. I can't go out and be a little bit, for one moment slovenly in my choices as a performer. I mean, these people have paid a lot of money to be here, they've been through the nightmare of getting here, starving themselves waiting for us to get on stage, so I'm going to give them what they came here for.

People pay a lot of money to go see shows now, they don't wanna know about your technical problems, or if you're not feeling good, they don't wanna know we have a glitch. It's their night, you better do something to earn that money.

I've been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward-it's not what people are used to-it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.

I have a very high respect for professional comedians. What they do astonishes me. You have to be really smart and absorb everything, repackage it, bring it back to the person, and make them laugh at themselves. I can make people laugh during my talks because they didn't come to have me make them laugh. It's added value. So my job is way easier than that of a professional comic.

The trick with sequels is, you have to give people what they liked before, yet be innovative enough so they don't feel like they're seeing the same movie.

What's important to me is that I put messages out, whether it's a TED talk, whether it's a book.

There is only one excuse for a speaker's asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.

A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

High Times magazine is a notch intellectually below Highlights for Children. I mean, they're both great to read when you're baked, but come on, ya know.

Playing two months or more in one city meant new songs all the time. If people paid their dimes to see and hear Sophie Tucker, they didn't want to hear the same songs over and over or see the same clothes.

As I put out more music, I really want to get to the point where people feel like my show is a must-see.

An effective speaker knows that the success or failure of his talk is not for him to decide - it will be decided in the minds and hearts of his hearers.

I always think that you have to have a certain understanding of what an audience would want to see from you as a public person as well as a character.