audience
I don’t write for children. I write—and somebody says, “that’s for children.”
“Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Part 1,” The Colbert Report, January 24, 2012.
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city—in every cranium—in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.
“The Loser’s Club,” in Manhood for Amateurs (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 5.
The whole time I’ve been building my audience I’ve also been trying to unbuild the walls that come with having an audience, with having power. The whole point is to be able to feel more, to connect more, and yet in some ways having power runs at cross-purposes to this. Maybe I feel more just by sitting with a friend. And can I make a career, as a filmmaker and performer, that makes this sitting-with-a-friend feeling more possible, for each member of the audience and for myself? Yes! I say yes.
“Miranda July,” interviewed by Rachel Kushner, BOMB magazine, Issue 92, Summer 2005.
I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.
July 1962 interview with Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall, in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), 18.
My first big gigs were opening a show for Frank Zappa and I think that was difficult. I was kind of like the rectal thermometer for the audience.
Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR, originally aired May 21, 2002.