Kevin Barry Quotes

I wasn't really much of a reader early on, but when I first started getting into reading at around 16 all I could really read was Kurt Vonnegut books.

As a teenager, I read a lot of science-fiction, but then I read 'Catch-22' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' and started reading more literary fiction.

There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.

Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

A joke's a very serious thing.

I love doing theaters, cracking people up, hearing them physically roll in the aisles. But we need to get serious. These are serious times. No joke. No joke.

I have a very dark sense of humor.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Eighty per cent of my output is 'Mallory clowns on the Western canon,' and I'm happy to be that person.

Cronenberg's a lot of fun, and that a lot of people don't know watching his movies. He doesn't take himself seriously. He's still reinventing himself.

Most period drama is so earnest. A lot of it is about making yourself take seriously things you wouldn't normally.

We do not take humor seriously enough.

Primarily I'm a social commentator rather than someone who's out to get the belly laugh.

It's great that I get accused of not being politically correct. People need to take themselves less seriously. This world is so screwed up as it is, we've all got to relax a bit more.

If you're watching a comedian on television and he's making a political point, I would say he's gotten too serious.

'Buncha Losers' comedy is one of those homegrown American art forms, up there with infomercials and Elvis-shaped soap carvings. No other civilization could have invented it. The French took a stab with Sartre's 'No Exit,' but then they had to ruin it with a lesson at the end.

Jon Ronson makes me laugh. I've read all of his books.

David Mamet's writing is pretty spectacular, obviously. I like the honesty of it; I like how funny it is and how sad it is.

People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre.

I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive.

I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing.

I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published 'V.' The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon.