Martin Short Quotes

Every once in a while, when the audience is expecting to see one thing, you have to show them something else.

It's always better to shock people and change people's expectations than to give them exactly what they think you can do.

The cloud never comes from the quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.

What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.

And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.

I'd like to change what people expect. I want to evoke something that's not nameable, for people to go, 'Huh?'

When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.

I like to be surprised! But it's always hard to surprise me.

In some ways, the audience becomes complacent when they go to a horror film. And so it's fun to take that attitude and then to upend it.

It's good to give people a jolt. If they're expecting one thing, it's important to give them something else. If you do something startling, audiences might at first freak out, but then they start to think, 'This is not going to be conventional. I'm going to enjoy this.'

You always have to be ahead of the audience so that they have to always catch up and know the movie's not quite going exactly where you think it's going, or expecting it to be going.

We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.

It's nice to squash people's expectations.

I feel the best way to respect my audience is to not give them what they expect from me... 'cause it's fun that way.

Pop shouldn't be a comfortable slipper. It should shock and surprise you and confront your expectations.

I never anticipated seeing 40.

I want people to be surprised.

To all of our viewers out there - expect the unexpected.

On 'The Chase,' I don't know what questions are going to appear, so they deliberately try and catch me out.

Expect the unexpected from me!

Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think

Always the tone of surpise.

Things are always different from what they might be.

Talk about the joys of the unexpected, can they compare with the joys of the expected, of finding everything delightfully and completely what you knew it was going to be?

Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.