Quotes about entertainment

The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.

— Lester Bangs

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

— John Berger

The reason I'm in this business, I assume all performers are -- it's Look at me, Ma! It's acceptance, you know -- Look at me, Ma, look at me, Ma, look at me, Ma. And if your mother watches, you'll show off till you're exhausted; but if your mother goes, Ptshew!

— Lenny Bruce

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

— Walt Disney

The Miss America contest is the most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.

— Gerald Early

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

— Kin Hubbard

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

— Samuel Johnson

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.

— Erica Jong

Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course.

— Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

— Steve Martin

Americans don't spend billions for entertainment. They spend it in search of entertainment.

— Source Unknown

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

— Orson Welles