The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

The death of a billionaire is worth more to the media than the lives of a billion poor people.

Some of the people who hate me love some of the sentences that I have written, until they get to the name of the person to whom the sentences are attributed.

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

But it’s still a big fight to get the work you’re really excited about onto shelves. And past that, convincing someone to pay you to do the work that you are most excited about is more than a trick, it’s a fucking scam of a magic trick.

I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.

Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded--the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]

My silence never means I don’t have nothing to talk, but it was important who were audiences and what was the topic.

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes. pg 156

Everyone likes to reminisce, but not one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

When an audience shares your prejudices you can always count on their applause.

And I was a Child again, watching the bright World. But the Spell broke when at this Juncture some Gallants jumped from the Pitt onto the Stage and behaved as so many Merry-Andrews among the Actors, which reduced all to Confusion. I laugh'd with them also, for I like to make Merry among the Fallen and there is pleasure to be had in the Observation of the Deformity of Things. Thus when the Play resumed after the Disturbance, it was only to excite my Ridicule with its painted Fictions, wicked Hypocrisies and villainous Customs, all depicted with a little pert Jingle of Words and a rambling kind of Mirth to make the Insipidnesse and Sterility pass. There was no pleasure in seeing it, and nothing to burden the Memory after: like a voluntarie before a Lesson it was absolutely forgotten, nothing to be remembered or repeated.