TV is easier: it's all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club you have to be really funny to win them over.

I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I'm not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I'm certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.

I think there have always been funny women from Carol Burnett to Joan Rivers. When the audience sees a woman they innately know she's worked twice as hard to get there she's had to prove that she can be the leader first and then be funny on top of it. She has to emit a confidence that she's in control.

I love readings and my readers but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful but I'm annoying and a phony.

I was so afraid to even read a paper in front of my classmates. It is very funny because at that point my teachers would never have believed that I could speak in front of an audience of over 2 000 people.

People ask 'How does doing a film compare to doing an ad?' Well when you're doing a commercial you don't have to sell tickets. You have a captured audience. Which is actually completely rare and great it gives you a lot of freedom. When you make a film you have to do advertisements for the film.

To her audience Janis Joplin has remained a symbol artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours.

Revolution! The people howls and cries Freedom that's what we're needing! We've needed it for centuries our arteries are bleeding. The stage is shaking the audience rock. The whole thing is over by nine o'clock.

If it's total freedom I guess the ultimate thing you can go into is total silence between the audience and performer with the performer projecting something he doesn't even have to play.

Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans - helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.

The wonderful thing about Food for Thought is that it lets you keep your hand in theater and be in front of a live audience without a commitment of six months or even three months.

My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.

I'm terrified of being too famous. What I'm really afraid of is that the audiences will go into the theater and not be able to forget that it's me that fame will stand in the way of my acting. I want to keep being able to change into different shapes and different personalities.

I'm not sure why no one wants to admit there's a viable audience out there that believes in God and wants to see a movie with their family. The demand is there. The supply is not.

I think it's been a little difficult at times for the audience because they've told me they see me as a family member. So to see your little sister sing about sex... I think they are pretty used to it now.

I now have two different audiences. There's the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years and the American family audience. American jokes less fighting.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family but they're also building an image and identity for themselves which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now.

We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they're a lead. I think that's a recipe for failure actually because if they become unsympathetic you lose your audience.

You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time you want to be truthful to the predecessors because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.

With a lot of films people are sitting on the outside looking in but I want the audience to get a bit more intimately involved with what's going on so that they maybe can experience it a little bit more intensely.

I think a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy. It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience what things are funny and not.

When I'm writing I'm constantly thinking about myself because it's the only experience I have to draw on. And I don't see an exact reflection of myself in every face in the audience but I know that my songs have validity to them and that's why the fans are there.

When I go to my live shows it's often a multigenerational audience a family bonding experience.

I think it's really really important to mix it up as an actor to try to get as much kind of varied experience as you can not only for your own personal growth as an actor but for the audience to keep them guessing about what you're going to do.

I know there are people who don't like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated but my audience has been very good - they don't bother me and when they do contact me it's usually on the nicest possible terms.

With 'Good Will Hunting ' Miramax made certain the recruited audience wasn't expecting to laugh at Robin Williams like they normally do. From my limited experience you can really blow test screenings by conducting them in the wrong way.

I prefer to think of the audience as a single living organism with which I am sharing a singular never-to-be-repeated experience.

In those days a concert was a personal experience. I wanted to be as close as possible to the audience and of course big stadiums didn't enable you to do that. It wasn't my style.

'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends it shows his mind working in real time sentence by sentence in what feels like a private audience with the reader.