A Quote by E. M. Forster

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping around the camp-fire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or wooly-rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.

E. M. Forster

Quote Topics

Against Around Asleep Audience Awake Camp Contending Either Fell Fire Happen Happened Heads Him His Judge Kept Listened Mammoth Man May Next Novelist Only Primitive Rhinoceros Shape Shock Skull Soon Stories Suspense Would

Quote Author

E. M. Forster
English - Writer
January 1, 1879 - June 7, 1970

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

E. M. Forster

You may have an older audience in front of you holding the Bible and a younger audience holding an iPhone. You don't want to lose either audience.

Tony Evans

The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I'll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.

Colm Toibin

Every audience is different, even within the same venue. You have to just make every audience your audience; you can't pre-judge an audience based on the size of the room or the type of room.

Patton Oswalt

A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

Terence Rattigan

I make some movies for myself. I do that sometimes when the subject matter is very sensitive and very personal and I really can't imagine that I'm an audience member. I would lose myself too much if I thought of myself as the audience. There are other types of genre films that I need to be able to direct from the audience, to be right next to you watching the picture being made.

Steven Spielberg

Every audience is different, even within the same venue. You have to just make every audience your audience; you can't pre-judge an audience based on the size of the room or the type of room. You've just got to be in the moment and go with it.

Patton Oswalt

You can look at what's happened to America in the last years and say a lot of people were asleep. A lot of people were not staying awake and watching what was going on and facing the pain of that and dealing with it.I don't care if the rest of the audience doesn't think along those lines at all, because the audience is a huge spectrum of people, from people who are introspective to people who just want to be scared and have fun, and all the points in between.

Wes Craven

I fell asleep during 'The Dark Knight Rises.' I fell asleep during 'The Hunger Games,' all of them. I cannot stay awake. As soon as a movie starts, I'm asleep!

Tituss Burgess

Wambaugh's naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned 'Centurions' and 'The Blue Knight' (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made him relevant to a larger audience and to the next generation of crime writers.

Sarah Weinman

I think the scripts for 'Line of Duty' and 'Blood' are both asking the audience to get involved in speculating as to what is going to happen next, or what should be happening next.

Adrian Dunbar

One night around that time, at Hammersmith, Bob Dylan was about to go into [his 1963 classic] 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.He said, 'Hey, Bucky! Play mandolin on this.' I am not really a mandolin player; I could only play in certain keys. Halfway through, he stops the band, turns to the audience and points to me. He says: 'He isn't playing, he's miming.' And then: 'Should I fire him?' The whole audience yells.

Bob Dylan

It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience want. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artist. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need

Alan Moore

When I started off in journalism, you knew there was an audience out there and that you wanted people to read what you produced. But it also felt like you had a limited ability to shape the audience, or to acquire an audience, for what you were doing. So you didn't really think too much about that.

Franklin Foer

The action genre is kind of designed for a young male audience. But we found on 'The Matrix' that we hit the Valhalla of movie making, which is the four quadrant audience - the young male audience, the older male audience, the young female audience and the older female audience.