Joshua Ferris Quotes

It's much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It's harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears.

I've always felt that in a comedy script the stage directions should also have a comedic value.

Reading Alan Zweibel makes me laugh out loud. And yet it is not a particularly funny name.

I realized that I really enjoy writing comedy, and how important comedy is when you feel like total crap.

To my friends and people I care about, I'm a really nice guy. No one wants to read a story where I saw a cute puppy on the street and I petted it. I mean, that's not funny. I only write about the funny stuff.

The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind-the humorous.

I do like to make films with a political theme, but sometimes it's nice simply to make people laugh. That's the hardest thing to do in fact.

The only responsibility I feel is to deliver something that's new or at least to attempt that. The real responsibility is to entertain and to try and make people laugh.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.

Even the people who do great jokes, [it's] always coming out of a very real place.

Since I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, 'cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center.

You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them.

I've found great virtue in two-thirds of the way into the message; right before I'm really want to nail home a point, pausing to tell a joke or to tell a light-hearted story, because I know my audience has been working with me now for 20 or 25 minutes. And if I can get them to laugh, get oxygen into their system, it wakes up those who might be sleeping, so there's something about using a story to draw people back in right before you drive home your final point. In that case I think it's real legitimate just to use a story for story's sake.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

Comedy is very important, yes. For one thing, it keeps you sane. But it's not really a conversion. I mean, it's marginally a conversion, because if people tune in or go to a nightclub or even watch television, and hear that a lot of other people are laughing at something you thought was not funny, at least it'll force you to reconsider.

Making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can have. And when you can make someone laugh and cry, alternatively, as Chaplin does - now that's the highest of all personal achievements. I don't know that I aim for it, but I recognize it as the supreme goal.

I was always sort of a ham as a kid, just always wanting to entertain and to get people to laugh.

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.

With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.

I've been writing jokes since I'm fifteen. Not out of happiness, but to go to a different place, because reality wasn't good to me.

Comedy doesn't come easy for me. I've only done 2 movies that are really comedy-style films and I have to work at them. And they're just as scary in a way. I hate labeling all these things; comedy, love stories, dark drama, whatever.