Engaging Audience Quotes

A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

Most great leaders are also great communicators. Great leaders have learned how to persuade so their objectives can be reached. The most powerful device to persuade is story. Stating facts and figures is not memorable. Emotionally connecting your audience to your idea through story will move them.

Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.

I believe in entertaining the audiences with whatever I do.

It is much better when a member resumes his seat after he has made a speech for the House to have the feeling that they wish he had gone on longer instead of wondering why he did not stop sooner.

When you have a great audience, you can just keep going and finding new things.

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way. My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen.

What writing a poem really does - and what figuring how to perform effectively really does - is forces people to listen to you. It frames your thoughts in such a way that grabs people's attentions and forces them to hear the things that you're actually saying.

Many, many years ago, I stood on the stage and told bad jokes and did Sophie Tucker as an impersonation, and nobody looked up; and suddenly, I looked down and said, 'Sir, I'm getting fed up with you. Either you watch, or I'm going to suck your neck,' or words to that effect, and suddenly people started to laugh.

You'll start talking, and pretty soon we'll all start nodding, and then the next thing you know, I'm hang gliding off the Eiffel Tower at night, being chased by ninja vampires

I wouldn't classify television as "cool," because to me anything that involves the reader's consciousness to drive and carry a story is an "active" medium, and anything that sort of just pours into the eyeballs and ears is the opposite.

There is something in the eloquence of the pulpit, when it is really eloquence, which is entitled to the highest praise and honour. The preacher who can touch and affect such an heterogeneous mass of hearers, on subjects limited, and long worn thread-bare in all common hands; who can say any thing new or striking, any thing that rouses the attention, without offending the taste, or wearing out the feelings of his hearers, is a man whom one could not (in his public capacity) honour enough.

Begin your story with a sentence that will immediately grab hold of your listener's ears like a surly nun in a Catholic school.

It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.

If I have to do a show every day, then I should have fun. It must have an element that enriches you as a person and as an actor.

You've got to work. You've got to want an audience to sit forward in their chairs sometimes, rather than sit back and be bombarded with images.

I think it is important to begin with a statement in your speech that grabs the attention of the audience. I try to make my opening line 15 words or less.

I love watching a movie that is smart, that makes me think, that includes me as an audience member, and I especially love it when I know that the people that I'm working with also do that.

I've often heard it said a preacher might learn with a comedian for a teacher.

Sarah Palin kept talking and talking, and the more she talks, the less compelling she can be. People say, "She's a very good politician, very deft at what she does," and whatever. And I hear that sometimes and go, "I don't know much about this stuff, but I would say no." Because the really good politician expands the audience, not contracts it. She may be getting a very vocal crowd, but it's a very specific group.

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.

I was a wrestling fan long enough, and once in a while, I would get bored. I'd be on board with a superstar and love what he'd do. Then eventually, I would get bored with him. I don't want people to think that way of me, so I'm doing everything I can to make sure it doesn't happen.

A speaker who does not strike oil in ten minutes should stop boring.

The reason you write something that is exciting and visceral is to force people to hear what you have to say, especially if you're in any kind of marginalized community where people don't want to listen. You have to come up with tricks to make them listen.

With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.