Audience

Audiences at the 2013 World Championships in Athletics in Moscow, Russia.

An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called "readers"), theatre, music (in which they are called "listeners"), video games (in which they are called "players"), or academics in any medium.

Quotes

• Always leave them wanting more.
  • Show business aphorism, commonly attributed to P.T. Barnum without citation; such as in "Pardon My French: How a Grumpy American Fell in Love with France" by Allen Johnson

Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations – many rare combinations.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
~ Walt Whitman

• Furtwangler was once told in Berlin that the people in the back seats were complaining that they could not hear some of his soft passages. "It does not matter," he said, "they do not pay so much."
  • Neville Cardus, in The Manchester Guardian (1935).

• I know two kinds of audience only one coughing and one not coughing.
  • Artur Schnabel, in My Life and Music (1961).

• A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content. A certain amount of encouragement is necessary.
  • Alfred North Whitehead in: Lucien Price (1954). Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead p. 66

• If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined.
  Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations.
  To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
  • Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (1892), III. Notes Left Over 3. Ventures, on an Old Theme, p.324