Jonathan Carroll Quotes

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?

When you get down to it, at it's root, Comedy is truth, absurdity, and pain. One of my little mottos is: 'Do you remember the Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown kicked the football and kissed the Little Red Haired Girl? Neither do I.'

When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.

As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That's what's funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.

My stories are never quite good enough.

The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy.

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.

When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there.

I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.

Humor is the only way to tell a story. Especially the dark ones.

Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.

[Comedy] is an escape from illusions. The audience is...thinking, 'This bullshit we see and hear all day makes no sense.'

This is terrible, when a writer is bored by his own work, but it was a real bomb and had reached the point where I couldn't even stand to look at it any more.

There's nothing more painful than writing.

I've always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.

Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

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

Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling, but there's another message in there, which is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.

The first 'Half-Life' movie treatment pitched to us climaxed with a tearful reunion between enslaved Vortigaunts and their Vortiwives and children. The last one I saw had Black Mesa invaded by a cavalry unit, just so as to feature a scene of bullsquids tearing into armored horses.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

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

Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there's comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.