Miriam Margolyes Quotes

I find Spike Jones' movies to be really very inventive and funny, but they're really sad and touching and really key into the different facets of the human experience.

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.

I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can't have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor.

Different things made 'Cheers' and 'Frasier' special. Both of them, though, were honest. It was the old Shakespeare thing: Hold the mirror up to life.

I can't not have something attached to like what actually happens in real life. Like I can't do a romantic comedy without there being something where like, in the case of Annie Hathaway's character, her character ends up having Parkinson's, you know? To me, I feel like that's love, you know? Like to me. So every movie has to have that kind of sense of that.

The joke that I make is that there are instances on the TV series that happen to me, - except on Sex and the City they always make it better or worse than real life and I am actually saying that in a joking way.

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

Life at best is bittersweet.

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

I always found that drama, really good drama, has a lot of comedy in it.

Some people would say comedy draws from some dark places, from your dark stuff. Life's great optimists aren't necessarily the funniest people.

Life serves up satire. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. I don't know. You have to reel it in to drama.

I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.

I don't think that there's necessarily a side to drama that has to be completely bleak. You have to have a flicker of humor 'cause everyone has a flicker of humor, something they find funny in life.

When you do a good comedy show, you have to understand that if you don't have drama or sad moments, then the comedy turns into a clowning kind of situation.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

Life is dramatic and comedic at times. Sometimes in the most dramatic situations, there is comedy. And good comedy comes from a sense of reality.

I am interested in shows that are not out-and-out gag fests: you see the truth of a broken heart behind them. That is what life is like: it's really funny, you see funny things as soon as you step out of the room, but underneath that is a whole bag of broken hearts. It's that real pain and that real hilarity that makes life so intriguing.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

A really good comedy, I think, is played as if it was real, and it's the circumstances that make it amusing. And I think that the - the inverse or the reverse is true for drama.

The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.

Humor without sadness underneath it feels cheap and aggressive.

I think it's true of every great comedy that it's rooted in some dramatic, incredibly personal truth. And it's true of all great drama that there has to be comedy.

Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.