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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.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you're doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers.

I wouldn't say that I'm actually trying to cause chills in the audience, but certainly my goal is to, at the very least, effect a physiological response - at the most, to effect some sort of state change, ideally, in the audience.

I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

If the speaker won't boil it down, the audience must sweat it out.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

You've got to write for your audience.

The first audience that you have when writing a book is you.

There's a certain freedom in writing when you don't know if you'll ever have an audience.