Geoff Dyer Quotes

Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece.

I think if you're trying to be funny, sometimes you're bending a piece of metal in a direction it doesn't want to go. And sometimes comedy just needs to find itself.

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.

Comedy writing is taking the brief thought and going with it.

And, you know, I liked writing humor. Well, I should say, I wanted to write seriously, but it kept turning funny.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

Melissa and I both say we don't write very good jokes.

I really like sardonicism and wit. I love the writing of Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore. I like Tina Fey, Amy Schumer.

I call it predicament humor. You don't do anything that cuts the star off at the knees or worse. You make him intelligent; you give him great ideas and great things to do.

You can be funny and say what you mean; these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Some of the best jokes came from people who meant it. See: Pryor, Bruce, Carlin, etc.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.

If you play it straight it's funny - the best comedy is always played straight down the middle. The adjustment is understanding from the screenplay that a moment is hilarious.

It's very hard to write humor.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

Humor writing is something that comes naturally to me.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

I'm particularly bad at breaking if something's funny. I'm not professional, so I do often laugh, but less at what I do and more often at what other people do.

There's always a message in my comedy.

Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it's use of language. We have at our disposal a great language... and the imaginative, creative use of that language can be at the service of humour.

I can't not write funny. It's literally the only way I know how to do it.

What most readers do not realize is that it takes a particular genius to write funny, to satirize.

I think so. I can't think of anything that requires more finesse than comedy, both from a verbal and visual point of view.

It's not about trying to be funny all the time. It's more of a document that hopefully is funny.

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.