Figuring out what the audience expects, and then doing something different, is great fun to me.

You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too. They've got to be able to relate to what you're doing.

How many watched the President's speech last night?
[half-hearted audience applause]
How many watched American Idol?
[thundering applause]
Okay, there you go! You get the government you deserve. Monologue, February 1, 2006

I'm a philanthropist: I give people what they want. People love being horrified, terrified.

Give them pleasure — the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach. 11 June 1956

I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.

As the Reader's Digest once said: "Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience."

Audience participation should extend from onstage to backstage to under the stage.

I wiggle my shoulders, I shake my legs, I walk up and down the stage, I hop around on one foot. But I never bump and grind. Why, that's vulgar. I'd never do anything vulgar before an audience. My mother would never allow it.

I've never gotten over what they call stagefright. I go through it every show. I'm pretty concerned, I'm pretty much thinking about the show. I never get completely comfortable with it, and I don't let the people around me get comfortable with it, in that I remind them that it's a new crowd out there, it's a new audience, and they haven't seen us before. So it's got to be like the first time we go on.

Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.

Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners.

They like to put their toe in the cold water of fear. On why people were fond of his thrillers

In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don’t want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

Of course, I would love everybody to see my films. But I don't care enough ever to do anything about it. I would never change a word or make a movie that I thought they would like. I really don't care if they come or not. If they don't want to come, then they don't; if they do come, then great. Do I want to do what I do uncompromisingly, and would I love it if a big audience came? Yes, that would be very nice. I've never done anything to attract an audience, though I always get accused of it over the years.

You can sit there and have a universal experience, of fear, of anger, of tears, of love, and I discovered that its the audience, really, that is doing the acting.