Val Guest Quotes

I'm just doing little bits and pieces for other magazines right now.

Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.

I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

I'm still auditioning and doing other movie parts, but I really like the developing and the writing. You have more control over your destiny.

By the time I was 7 or 8, I wanted to be a comedy writer.

I've done work for hire. I've worked for DC and Dark Horse.

You write what makes you laugh, and you hope that the audience agree, and so far they do.

Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.

I can't write a joke. I could never write. I do a lot of stories and I call them stories, but they're just comedy recitals on a given subject.

I'm developing more stuff in my voice, more Nick Swardson. It's me as myself in a sense and kind of in my voice, no accent no affectation. I'm growing into my own persona.

I'm good at coming up with wacky characters and funny dialogue.

You know, my first album, some of those jokes I'd done for twelve years because I couldn't throw 'em out.

When people slave over those scripts and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for them, they don't usually want you to add farts.

My dad played a character on the radio called 'Parkyakarkus.' A Greek-dialect comedian. He did Friars' roasts and wrote material and made people laugh that way. But he wrote his own shows with other writers.

I loved doing 'Frisky Business.' I didn't come up with it. I think John Oliver and the writers did.

I'm very driven by writing. Coming from 'Saturday Night Live,' because it's such a writing job, and we all write our parts on the show and create characters, I'm so respectful of good writing.

I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy!

I think the future belongs to the comedic polymath. It belongs to the person who can generate the most good material in the biggest variety of ways, whether it's sketches or stand-up or songs or tweets or television or films.

Before I went to a meeting at the 'Harvard Lampoon,' I had no idea that there was even a comedy magazine at Harvard, let alone that you could write comedy potentially for a living.

Your average sitcom writer is a very intellectual person.

I wanted to be a director and comedian and my plan was to go to NYU. I wanted to be in UCB.

I'm not sure what my material would have been if I'd have started earlier. I probably would have started with 'Damsels in Distress' kinds of films because that's the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn't really have any life experience to work off of.

I love to write humor. If I could make a living doing it that is all I would write.

If you can't write your own material, you have very little chance of making it as a comedian.

Sometimes when you do a whole script, you hand it off, and it gets rewritten by a bunch of people, and people don't really get that much of a sense of how funny you can be.