Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Comedy is tragedy plus timing.
The world needs less destruction.
The laugh is what trumps everything.
Everybody needs some good sketch comedy.
The '50s sucked for a lot of people on Earth.
I always wrote risque comedy and crude comedy.
I enjoy crude behaviour and language. I revel in it.
You say you're going to be the pope, become the pope.
We don't feel constrained by what we did in the past.
I don't think the sketch on its own is a great sketch.
In America, we can reinvent ourselves - we're encouraged to.
All those Bob Hope specials made me cringe when I was a kid.
I went to New York in '87 to write for 'Saturday Night Live.'
The worst thing is to read bad reviews and go, "Yeah, I agree."
If you surround me with darkness, suddenly, I am "somewhat fun."
I think everybody has a public persona. We all present ourselves.
My goal, whenever entering a project, is always to gain 12 pounds.
I think that cable TV is a great venue to do something interesting.
Vince Gilligan is a wizard - and a fantastically hard-working wizard.
Don't say you're going to stop eating red meat when you like red meat.
It's nice that the independent scene is taken seriously, and has been.
My daughter got me a 'World's Best Dad' mug. So we know she's sarcastic.
You shouldn't eat red meat, but you shouldn't make resolutions you can't keep.
All people are sad clowns. That's the key to comedy - and it's a buffer against reality.
I can't really say how big the cult is. But I'm proud of it. I'm proud that it has a life.
It's fun to discover things. I wouldn't want everything laid out, simply and too obviously.
When I go to M Bar there's all kinds of agents there, looking for people who doing good stuff.
Drama is more focused, and it reveals itself to you, whereas comedy is just right there when you first read it.
Drama is more focused and it reveals itself to you, whereas comedy is just right there, when you first read it.
My godfather was a Chicago policeman, and I've always looked at law enforcement as a challenging and interesting job.
Directing is probably the best job, but acting is really, really great. It's like a fun vacation that you get paid for.
I think that acting is no fun unless it's hard. I'm not titillated by acting or being an actor unless I have to work hard.
When you're 20 you can put a ton of old-age prosthetics on and be an old guy, but when you're 70 you can't play a 20-year-old.
I love any scene where there's a physical confrontation. It reminds me that I'm in show business and I play pretend for a living.
We're all real people with moments of intense honesty and pathos and humanity. We all experience that, whether you're comedic or not.
If you're committed enough, you can make any story work. I once told a woman I was Kevin Costner, and it worked because I believed it.
I probably do better when I'm in charge. But it's good to be able to be a part of something and be a supporter and help make a project work.
You can't guarantee that you'll make a great movie, but you can make a greater effort than I made at trying to see that the basics are there.
It's dangerous to get calm. You need some nerves to work from, it's good energy. It's not good to have no nerves. You'd fall asleep on stage.
Being comedic is a skill, because there is a fine line where the context is important. And being dramatic is just being honest and real in that moment.
I'm about to go to Sundance for my 3rd year, and Sundance has never felt like a real independent festival at all. On the other hand, it might to start feel that way.
I have a lot of opinions. I express them in 'Mr. Show' very clearly, I think. I feel like both David Cross and I felt like that show reflected each of us pretty wholly.
I actually think there's a potential, a crazy potential, that network TV could become something valuable and worthwhile, just because of fear on the part of the networks.
My experience - and it might be just the kind of comedy that I do, which is usually sketch comedy - is that there's a lot more texture and subplot in drama than in comedy.
I pretty much read reviews and comments only looking for the negative. Literally, when I read positive comments, it's like a zero. I think the issue is if you agree with it or not.
I'm hypersensitive to negativity and duplicity, and I want to push it away by writing comedy. Maybe that hypersensitivity comes across and allows me to play dastardly, multi-layered people.
I've always tried to have a rule that you shouldn't make fun of innocent people who can't defend themselves. I find that a little unseemly and distasteful. But nothing's really sacred to me.
In acting, you're only responsible for your part. When you're directing, the load is on your shoulders, so you have to feel a strong connection to the material. It's a higher bar to get over.
Humans are ridiculous. We're all pathetic strivers who will fall short. If you can accept that, it's optimistic because you can shoot for the moon and know you're never going to get there, and that's OK.
There's timing in drama. You have to have a sense of rhythm. But the real thing that lends yourself to drama as opposed to comedy is a sense from the audience of whether there's more to it than you can see.