Ron White Quotes

My lyrics aren't offensive. Some people find everything offensive.

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.

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

Things I used to get in trouble for writing at 'SNL,' suddenly other people like it.

There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda. Propaganda can be written by anybody, including dictators.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren't funny. Some of them weren't appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.

My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.

I like to reserve the right to write about whatever I like.

In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.

I deliver very traditionally, and people aren't threatened. I think if I cursed or seemed wilder, I couldn't get away with the amount of very opinionated politics I get away with.

We're the guys who, if someone says you really shouldn't do an episode making fun of Scientologists, we say, 'Whatever.' Someone says, 'They might come try to burn your house down,' we say, 'We'll just get another one.'

It's easier not to make a particular joke in case it offends. But every joke will offend someone, and I've always believed that the audience is bigger than one person. The danger is that things will become bland.

It just so happens that people aren't doing comedy about abortion or cannibalism or waterboarding. And that to me doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't aspects of those subjects that are funny, it just means that people are too uptight.

The success of my comedy has been not being afraid to touch on subject matters or issues that everyone else is politically scared of.

We need less perfect but more free films.

I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.

When you're a stand-up comic, you live and die by what you say on stage. There's no director or writer or producer who can tell you what to say and not to say. Once in a while, a club owner will ask a comic to work clean, or not say something, but that's few and far between.

'The Onion' is an amazing place to work because it's a bunch of really smart, collaborative writers who aren't afraid to try crazy things.

I feel you should be able to write about whatever you want.

It's really frustrating when you write a show and it's really funny and someone and from Standards and Decency says, 'You can't put that in because it has a naughty word.'

Because I didn't think anyone would actually listen to my music, I thought I could say whatever I wanted.