James Gunn Quotes

My music has to be funny and sad and happy and loving; it's gotta have it all. When somebody's just too dark all the time, it's just drama. Or if somebody's too funny? Well, I like being too funny sometimes.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.

I can be dramatic. I can be funny. I can be sexy. I can be sad. I can be glad.

I think people appreciate a songwriter who shows different sides. The whole angst thing is cool, but if that's all you've got, it's just boring. Everything I write, whether it's happy or sad, has a sense of humor to it.

Funny and sad are two sides of the same coin. I think that most comedians are able to tap into deep subject matter.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.

No person is just one particular emotion.

Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music. But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things.

Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.

I embrace everything about Ally... I don't particularly see her as a whiner. One week she's tough, the next she's really weak. I love that. She's human.

Any film which views the darker side of life, which is death with a sense of humor, is very much to my taste.

There's always been a confusion about my sensibility. 'Is he kind of edgy, or is he Carol Burnett?' I'm a little bit of a hybrid. I like to please, but I like dark stuff, too.

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 definitely have a lot of different layers inside of me.

'Baskets' is incredible - 'Baskets' is so funny and poignant and sad and dark.

With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.

I'm crazy, but I'm serious. I'm sentimental, but I'm, like, really hard, too. I just want people to understand that I have all these sides inside me.

I find heartbreaking stuff really funny.

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.

I love down-and-dirty and grit. But I do think that my favorite dramas are ones that are dark comedies because I think that the only way the audience and the actor can really go as dark and deep as you may want to go is if there's some levity added to it.

I think people have a hard time dealing with a bunch of things at once. They can't have something be disturbing and funny at the same time. They can't have that kind of combination. Which is weird to me because I feel complicated about most things.

My daughters prefer Tears for Fears songs as they're more upbeat and generic. Dad's songs are 'a little too sad' for them, which just means that they're harder to understand.

I'm not the dude with the message. I'm a human being with different sides, different shades and different emotions, different feelings.