John Patrick Shanley Quotes

I looked into studying psychoanalysis, wrote to the governing body and was about to start the year where they psychoanalyse you, four times a week, before you get to do it yourself. I just thought I'd taken the ventriloquism as far as I could. My act is so deconstructive, and I'd made all the monkey jokes anyone wanted to hear.

In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

I think your tendency when you play yourself is to accentuate something about you that you think is the funny thing about you.

My act is pretty much me reflecting on what I want to talk about and what I think is funny and what has happened to me.

My main goal is to really make people think, and laugh while they do so.

I've always wanted to try things for myself before passing a judgment on them.

I'm in the middle of an existential crisis in how I approach comedy about these big issues. I sometimes find, when I get drawn on the subject of race, it's too close to home for me and I can't articulate what I'm trying to get across.

I think when I started doing stand-up, that's when I really tried to question everything in my belief system which is - I think a pretty important part of being a comedian is really questioning things.

I like to read, but otherwise I'm just your average, self-obsessed comedian. It's pretty much all I think about.

Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic.

As I always have with stand-up or anything, you kind of draw on what you're going through in your life.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

Somebody insults you and you feel anger. Don't miss this opportunity; try to understand why, why this anger. And don't make it a philosophical thing. Don't go to the library to consult about anger. Anger is happening to you -- it is an experience, a live experience. Focus your whole attention on it and try to understand why it is happening to you. It is not a philosophical problem. No Freud is to be consulted about it. There is no need! It is just foolish to consult somebody else while anger is happening to you. You can touch it. You can taste it. You will be burned by it.

You should look up some of the reviews. The New York Times review is so over-the-top funny. It's hysterical. You should dig it out.

I feel more confident in being able to be funny if I'm comfortable with the people I'm around. When you're friends with them, it just makes it all the better. Plus, shooting a movie, you're sitting on your ass for hours at a time, so if you have somebody there to mess around with and have fun, then it's great.

In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.

Be sensitive to your mistakes. Put it on the wall for a couple of weeks. It may be that you can learn more from the study of your own work than from others.

I have the kind of show that reminds you of your problems, and then I talk about other problems you didn't even know you had until tonight.

One of the goals of analysis is you become your own analyst. You continue the process even if you're not in therapy, whether you continue the process by walking down the street thinking about things or whether you continue the process, as I do, by writing about them.

I'd worked with Marlon [Brando] a couple of times, and he was a practical joker. He was far more interested in getting jokes out than getting the words out. We laughed all the time.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.

We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator.

I hate turkeys. If you go to the grocery store, you start to get mad at turkeys. You see turkey ham, turkey bologna, turkey pastrami. Somebody just needs to tell the turkeys, "Man, just be yourselves!" I already like you, little fella. I used to draw you. If you had a couple of fingers missing, you would draw a really messed-up turkey. That turkey was in an accident!

Nothing tells more about the character of a man than the things he makes fun of.