
“It is much better for a writer to be underrecognized than over, in terms of keeping one’s head down, like the proverbial Japanese nail, so that one might observe the world unhammered and unimpeded. Abjure fame and avoid obscurity. But between those extremes lies the perch where a writer occasionally might do some good work. There’s a Jack Butler Yeats painting I love, showing a wild celebration of St. John’s Eve in western Ireland, with Yeats and J. M. Synge standing in the background, watching and looking small and out of the picture. Yet it was they who created the picture, and a good deal more.”
Roger Rosenblatt
more infosource: “Please Turn to the Chapter on Obscurity . . .,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2014.
category: audience, fame, obscurity, recognition, writing
medium: newspaper essay
“I don’t write for children. I write—and somebody says, ‘that’s for children.'”
Maurice Sendak
more infosource: “Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Part 1,” The Colbert Report, January 24, 2012; watch here (well worth it)
category: audience, children's story, writing
medium: Interview
“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.”
Michael Chabon
more infosource: “The Loser’s Club,” in Manhood for Amateurs (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 5.
buy on Amazon
category: art, audience, creativity, fandom, solitude
medium: Essay
“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
more infosource: “Miranda July,” interviewed by Rachel Kushner, BOMB magazine, Issue 92, Summer 2005.
category: audience, connection, film, performance
medium: Interview
“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.”
Vladimir Nabokov
more infosource: July 1962 interview with Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall, in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), 18.
view on Google Books
category: audience, self, writing
medium: Interview
“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.”
Tom Waits
more infosource: Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR, originally aired May 21, 2002; transcript here; audio here
category: audience, Frank Zappa, music
medium: Radio Interview


audience