Naomi Alderman Quotes

The actors work out how to create the show with me during the rehearsals. They owe it to themselves and each other to maintain that contract regardless of what the critics say.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.

I honestly think I could sit down and write a show tonight that the critics would love, and I know it would be canceled within four weeks. I know what the critics love. We write and produce for people, not for critics.

The network shows tend to be run, in general, in my experience, by committee, and it's hard for actors and writers to do their jobs.

If it pleases you and you can write at all, it's gonna please somebody else.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.

When you have the cast, the sets, the lights, an opera takes on its own life. I'm not one of those directors who marches in with a set of plans.

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.

Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else.

You have to make films you feel strongly about. And then hope you can find the audience.

When I write a book... it's the same essential approach to music as with books. It has to be something I want to hear or read. Hopefully the audience comes along, since that's the only way you can write righteously. I have to ask, 'What do I want to hear?' not 'What do people want to hear?'

If the audience knew what they wanted then they wouldn't be the audience, they would be the artist.

When the business starts shaping the art, or the delivery of the art, then it's not right.

To bring a large audience to a piece of serious music and make it accessible does not mean reducing it in any way. And I've learned that if something is good, even if it is a little difficult, people will get that it is good.

Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

I never, in anything I've ever done, tried to get you to like it. I was never going to succeed at that. That's not the way most entertainment is made. Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.

I just really try to stay focused on what the material is wanting to do. My basic assumption is that no one will ever listen to it anyway. It's fidelity to the material. That's my contract: It's me and the material. And if it connects with other people, I'm thrilled.

So much about getting onstage is creating a connection with an audience that allows you to go different places and try different things.

I always make music as an art - it's never been a product for me.

I refuse to make films where the audience comes for consumption. I make films where you know you are also part of the process.

At the end of the day, I just like to make the best music that I can make and put it out to the world and see how they respond to it.

You can make what you want. People care about what the artist has to say, what the sound is, and how it affects them.