Mike Nichols Quotes

I try to find humor in everything I do, because I think all great plays - even great tragedies - have enormous humor in them.

I've always said people say on a dramatic show, 'I was crying. It was so emotional when he went and grabbed that little girl from a burning building and handed her over to her mother.' In comedy, the best thing you can say is, 'I think it's funny.'

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

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

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.

But our comedies never endured long without a tragedy.

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

I trained in Shakespeare, and that's all comedy, even when it's tragedy.

I really think if you take away a character's obstacles then there's no comedy.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

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

It's great extremes which leads to great drama and great comedy.

Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.

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

People think comedians don't do drama. Comics are drama. And what is drama, as opposed to comedy? It's all the same to me.

I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it's crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it's laughing. Nowadays, we would say, 'How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.'

You can't be funny unless you're tragic, and you can't be tragic unless you're funny.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

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.

I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation. I see myself as a performer and that applies to a Greek drama or a modern comedy.

If you look at 'The Best Man,' there's a lot of humor in that, but I never consider that movie a comedy. I felt that it was a drama with comedic elements and comedic parts to it.

Comedy is much more difficult than tragedy-and a much better training, I think. It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare.