John Prine Quotes

There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry — or laugh.

All great humorists are sad... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest - the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

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

Life is such a tragicomedy.

I've always enjoyed watching characters that aren't aware that they're doing anything funny. And I think that inherently makes them funnier.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy. That's the comedy that I like.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

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.

Life itself is pretty funny when you realize how absurd it can be.

History sometimes makes fun of us and our best intentions.

I think of everything as comedy, but I don't think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There's always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.

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.

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

If you examine any aspect of the human condition long enough, you really do have to start laughing at it. Because the business of being human is kind of ridiculous.

I find life a mix of humor and pathos, and all my books reflect that to one degree or another.

I always felt like the best comedy came out of sadness, and some of my favourite shows growing up - a lot of my influences - have these very sad characters and treat that sadness seriously while also being very funny.