Thomas McGuane Quotes

I don't know what it must be like to be a writer in general, but to be a comedy writer, it's got to be something - it's a very special kind of talent.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

You can't be funny if you don't have good material.

And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun.

I love to write jokes and that's all I think about.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

Twitter is comedy writing. It's one-liners that give way to fully fleshed-out thoughts.

Your average sitcom writer is a very intellectual person.

I find writing is the most fun I have in comedy.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.

Louis CK knows that just because a joke is using space as a resource instead of something to be crammed like a hamper, this doesn't mean a story isn't happening.

As a comic, I think I'm very verbally oriented about a lot of the stuff that I've written or thought up and how I say it.

I get giddy with the idea of stringing words together that make people laugh.

I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing - that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around.

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.

I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.

The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it.

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job.

Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I think that's how I tap into it.

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.

Write whatever you like!

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

What made me a comedian was that I wasn't really a songwriter, I was more of a poet.