When you make a TV show, they always say you’re a guest in someone’s home. Online, you’re a guest in someone’s face. So that’s why I try to make it sound and look and feel very inviting and attractive, because I know that I’m in your face.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

When you’re headlining, people are paying to come see you specifically. It’s a different kind of pressure, because you’ve got to deliver. You’ve got to give these people what they paid for. It’s a different mind state, a different type of mentality, but it’s honestly a pretty good problem to have, you know?

I work hard for the audience. It’s entertainment. I don’t need validation.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

A film is sort of binary – it either works or it doesn’t work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie, then it works, that is all.

I think if you make a good movie, people walk away arguing.

Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word – and actually wanting to see you.

Jim Cramer is a very smart man. I watch his show. I just do not follow his advice.

Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life giving speeches.

I’m used to seeing it, but it’s weird having an Academy Award. You usually only see one of them on the TV show when they give them out, so it’s kind of surreal to have one in your house.

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

You go to a festival, you know you’re not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I’ve made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

You’ve got to keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience is thinking, and know what they’ll accept from you.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

My show ‚The Big House‘ was picked up; they flew me to New York. I’m about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart’s ‚The Big House.‘ And a hand grabs my shoulder, ‚Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.‘ It’s a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can’t.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

I think that people are interested seeing me on the screen.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

I don’t know if I’m selfless – I still want to make a great record. I want to make a hit record. I want to tour; that’s not completely selfless. But the truth is I’m not interested in people coming to my show for me as much as I am for them coming to my show for themselves. That’s always been how I am.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

I take a lot of pride in the work I do, because people pay to see me. They’ve got to get babysitters, park their car, get popcorn and candy. I’ve got to be conscious of that.

So when I speak in front of thousands, tens of thousands of people, I don’t really get nervous because I know what I want to say and I know what message I want to give.

Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less.

We were on for six years. We were in syndication for a while. It had its run. I still see the people from ‚Mr. Belvedere,‘ too. We stay in touch.

Most of the stuff I do on the show comes out of me just trying to make my friends laugh.

I usually don’t like to ‚spoon feed‘ my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

If you want to appeal to everyone, you can’t do a world tour and expect black people to show up at every date – when you’re in Australia, when you’re in Dubai, when you’re in Indonesia.

What was important to me was entertaining the audience, and whether that meant winning, losing, singing, or whatever it was on the live show we were doing every week, which was awesome, I was game for it.

Dude, maybe not everyone loves ‚Glee.‘ Me included. I watched 10 minutes and it wasn’t my thing.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

When you say, ‚I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore,‘ people always say, ‚Oh, really?‘ They think of the TV show. So I just say, ‚A cute little harbor town in New Jersey.‘

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.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

What I’m hoping is that every album I’m going to do will give my audience something different, and that they’ll grow as I do.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

A person standing in front of an audience without enthusiasm for his subject and his actions is disconnected from his spirit.

I’ve been invited to do ‚Dancing With the Stars‘ three times, but Lifetime said no.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

‚The Simpsons‘ appearances were great fun. But I don’t take them too seriously. I think ‚The Simpsons‘ have treated my disability responsibly.

I’ve never been one to sit back and go, ‚I’d better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don’t want to lose them.‘

If you’re performing music that is not who you are or where you’re at, it is painful. It’s painful for the performer and for the audience.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I’m such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

On ‚Grey’s Anatomy‘ I wouldn’t care what I was playing – I would play a corpse, ‚cause I love it that much. It is deep true love, and it will never die.

What we will do is we’ll say, ‚Okay, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.‘ But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

It is one thing to record an album but it’s a huge difference when people play it and listen to it and embrace it the way that I do. It has always been my dream to get my music out to the world and have people hear it.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

SNL is a home. You’ve got all of your brothers and sisters there, and it’s a great time.

It’s simple: You get a part. You play a part. You play it well. You do your work and you go home. And what is wonderful about movies is that once they’re done, they belong to the people. Once you make it, it’s what they see. That’s where my head is at.

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

NBC had a show called ‚The Toughest Bouncer in America‘ that I did. But I told them I didn’t like that term, ‚bouncer.‘ To me, it’s offensive. A bouncer likes to get physical, likes to put his hands on people.

Because the Internet is so new, we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the Web.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.