Martin McDonagh Quotes

I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.

Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.

I'm very interested in people, so if a character happens to be real, there's that much more to look at.

It is an absolutely vain endeavor to attempt to reconstruct or even comprehend the nature of a human being by simply knowing the forces which have acted upon him. However deeply we should like to penetrate, however close we seem to be drawing to truth, one unknown quantity eludes us: man's primordial energy, his original self, that personality which was given him with the gift of life itself. On it rests man's true freedom; it alone determines his real character.

It's a real democratic time for comedy, and I think my special is a sign for that. You don't have to just be a classic stand-up to get a special, or you don't just have to be on Saturday Night Live to do characters and sketch on TV. The web has allowed me to show that there are different ways to make people laugh, and the special is a combination of those things.

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.

While I'm trying to be a villain, Tyler Posey's just making me break character all the time. It's hilarious.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.

I do characters. I believe in that. I think people are interesting. Now, everybody that you meet in New York City thinks that their life is a movie.

Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.

There are two things I know about life... Only the good die young but the real jerks will live forever.

Cruelty does not make a person dishonest, the same way bravery does not make a person kind.

The timing of comedy is so difficult. You've got to leave room for a laugh, you don't want to kill the laugh, but on film, you can't just suddenly stop for a laugh and then carry on. So, I think it's a real art form, comedy on film.

A German writer observes: "The noblest characters only show themselves in their real light. All others act comedy with their fellow-men even unto the grave.

In the plays of Shakespeare man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.

In art as in politics we must deal with people as they are not as we wish them to be. Only by working with the real can you get closer to the ideal.

All jokes aside, it's a very difficult job playing the straight man. Jason is potentially the most brilliant straight man that ever was because he's also really funny while doing it, which is even harder. I've always seen myself playing characters who are flawed. We use comedy in our lives to obscure the drama.

The secret to comedy is not playing the comedy, but actually playing the situation, playing the drama of it.

Comedy and I were never strangers, it's just that I was doing a lot of drama.

I don't make a habit of watching my parents' films, because it is a little strange. But I will say that I binge watch House of Cards compulsively, and I think it's the first time I've ever seen one of my mom's projects and totally forgot she was my mom! She's honestly that good, and, also, her character is the exact opposite of who she is in real life.

In some ways, comedy and something like a musical do go hand-in-hand.