Mort Sahl Quotes

I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it.

I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.

Whether you're starving in a garret or living in a castle like J. K. Rowling, I had this image of the author as a flawless, composed individual, serene in the knowledge they were creating art.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.

I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.

When talent fails, indignation writes the verse.

Art should never try to be popular.

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

I'm interested in the fact that comics are people who are oddly courageous in their desire and their commitment to sacrificing any sense of normalcy in their lives, any sense of security, and most of them are oddly unique individuals. Let's have a broader conversation with people that have spent their last however-many-years thinking about their lives. I mean, they're philosophers. They're poets. They're people who are on the outside looking in at the world through a different set of values.

It is a love/hate relationship I have with the human race. I am an elitist, and I feel that my responsibility is to drag the human race along with me, that I will never pander to, or speak down to, or play the safe game.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

I always felt that it was easier to take a funny person and teach them to write television than to take somebody who was a television writer and make them funny.

I think it's that much harder to make a good comedy than it is straight and apparently serious.

The more obscure our tastes, the greater the proof of our genius.

A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

I'm in awe of comedians that do things that I can't do, whether it be a one-liner comic like Anthony Jeselnik, whether it be social issues commentary, whether it be - hell, Carrot Top. I can't be Carrot Top. I can't.

Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.

The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.

I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."

I would rather have written Fables in Slang than be President.

Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I'm tired of saying "How wonderful you are!" to fool men, who haven't got one half sense I've got.