The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly.

He that has been bitten by a snake is afraid of a rope.

I am convinced that no one is fully educated without a full grounding in the arts.

It's a good idea to have friends both in Heaven and in Hell.

My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.

Never marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.

Old people whimper, and cry, and belch, and make great hollow rumbling sounds at table; old people wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and find out they haven't even been asleep; and when old people are asleep, they try to wake up, and they can't... not for the longest time.

That's all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that's all that's important; a sense of dignity. And it doesn't matter if you don't care or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don't care, 'cause, if you don't have that, civilization's doomed.

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.

Being different is ... interesting theres nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference of course produces natural caution and if the differences are too extreme ... well then reality tends to fade away.

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

Any definition which limits us is deplorable.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.

We're making a commercial Hindi film catering to all types of audiences.

I wonder if that's hurt me at the box office. Maybe audiences these days want to know exactly what to expect when they go into a movie, and my movies are hard to explain in just one way.

Audiences always sound like they're glad to see me, and I'm damned glad to see them.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.

Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.

Anyway, I collapsed in France in the middle of a tour. I hadn't been eating properly, I was getting very phobic about audiences, and I collapsed in pure fright.

Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.

I don't pay attention to target audiences and therefore I often hear that I am a ratings killer, somebody who fundamentally doesn't care whether one person is watching or an entire soccer stadium.

I want to do what I want when I want to do it not be dictated to by audiences.

I also want to return to doing stand-up. I've become frightened of live audiences. This is a really telling sign that I need to go back on the comedy circuit again.

For me to go back and to play for audiences some of whom have been following me for thirty years and some who have found me in the last five or six years, that's really an interesting thing. I have an audience that goes from kids to seventy year olds.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.