Norman Maclean Quotes

I am never, never, sick at sea. What never? No never! What never? Hardly ever.

Louie Anderson thinks my thing is the absurdness of reality. That's what we do on 'Portlandia' all the time. I try to bring that absurdness of reality to everything.

The whole character of Super Dave is a takeoff on people who pontificate. So one thing I never want to do is pontificate why this works, why this is funny. I have no idea what the appeal is. All we are trying to do is make people have a good time and laugh.

It's a challenge to do satire when the thing you're satirizing is almost beyond satire, but I think that's a challenge for everybody.

That's what I love about 'MADtv': If you exist, if you breathe, we will take you down.

The day after Paul Newman was dead, he was twice as dead.

satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!

Satire recoils whenever charged too high; round your own fame the fatal splinters fly.

His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like 'the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo.

Satire is a composition of salt and mercury; and it depends upon the different mixture and preparation of those ingredients, that it comes out a noble medicine, or a rank poison.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.

We told Stanley Roberts to go on a water diet, and Lake Superior disappeared.

I am a comedian and you guys know whatever I say, I don't mean any of it.

In comedy, falling means laughter. You can take something sacred and make it silly. The more sacred it is, the funnier it is. It has a bigger drop to fall.

For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.

There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.

Behold!" Percy shouted. "The god's chosen beverage. Tremble before the horror of Diet Coke!

When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve, "My dear, we live in an age of transition."

They say give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. But teach a man to fish and he'll get his own show on the Discovery Channel.

I used to love going fishing. I think it was really about the clothes. Nothing says real man like a vest with 38 pockets and a mesh hat with hooks in it.

I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department.

It was raining in the small, mountainous country of Llamedos. It was always raining in Llamedos. Rain was the country's main export. It had rain mines.

I think Georges Feydeau said comedy is just tragedy speeded up.