I'm probably my biggest critic. I worry that if you spend any quality time reveling in good things then karma will slap you upside the head, so I try to stay as even keel as I'm able.
Neil Patrick HarrisRead
I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.
Interpretation
Engaging with an audience is crucial for performers, as their reactions guide the performance.
In this quote, Neil Patrick Harris emphasizes the importance of being attuned to an audience's reactions during a performance, particularly in theatre and sitcoms. He suggests that attentive performers can sense when the audience's interest wanes through subtle cues such as sniffles and the rustling of playbills, indicating the need to adapt and keep the audience engaged.
In practice
During a director's speech about the importance of audience interaction in a play.
I'm probably my biggest critic. I worry that if you spend any quality time reveling in good things then karma will slap you upside the head, so I try to stay as even keel as I'm able.
I need to stop carving out four-hour chunks to do random things and go home and watch my children grow up.
I enjoy darker sardonic wit more than knock-knock jokes. I spent the first healthy chunk of my career playing all-American, pleasant, average, nice people, so it's fun to have some complications there.
I'm a big proponent of monogamous relationships regardless of sexuality, and I'm proud of how the nation is steering toward that.
I don't know, but I think kids just want to be listened to, so I want to make sure I do that.
It PASSED! Marriage equality in NY!! Yes!! Progress!! Thank you everyone who worked so hard on this!! A historic night!
That’s why an artist must be a warrior and, like all warriors, artists over time acquire modesty and humility. They may, some of them, conduct themselves flamboyantly in public. But alone with the work they are chaste and humble. They know they are not the source of the creations they bring into being. They only facilitate. They carry. They are the willing and skilled instruments of the gods and goddesses they serve.
So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.
I do - very specifically, I remember Bessie Smith; I used to collect 78 records that I would buy from the St Vincent de Paul store at five cents apiece, and I did this indiscriminately. I would just take whatever was there. And I listened to Patti Page and Walter Huston, 'September Song.'
Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections.
The music you make is shaped by what you play it on ... if you feel that you're not getting enough out of a song, change the instrument - go from an acoustic to an electric or vice versa, or try an open tuning ... do something to shake it up.
To make music means to express human intelligence by sonic means. This is intelligence in its broadest sense, which includes not only the peregrinations of pure logic but also the "logic" of emotions and intuition. My musical techniques, although often rigorous in their internal structure, leave many openings through which the most complex and mysterious factors of the intelligence may penetrate.
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