Terry Pratchett Quotes

Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching--and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book.

Although Kurt Vonnegut may not be considered a humor writer, 'Breakfast of Champions' is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill.

I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'

Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.

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

If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there's just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.

My early prose style - this is so embarrassing - was sort of a suburban, Presbyterian knockoff of Woody Allen.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.

I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.

My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.

I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.

As a former writer for the 'National Lampoon,' I've probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.

No author's writing more influenced my own than that of Robert Louis Stevenson. My first steampunk story, 'The Ape-box Affair,' is a sort of melange of Stevenson and P.G. Wodehouse.

I thought that through the strip, I could vent my spleen and be funny at the same time. But when it comes to humor, there's no substitute for reality and politicians.

It's always fun to write the little bit of TV that the characters watch in 'Gravity Falls,' because it's a perfect place to poke fun at the media.

'Athletico Mince' started life as a football podcast but has dropped the football, unless the latest on the state of the 'hair island' atop Steve McLaren's head is your idea of football coverage.

Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen's wonderful - this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.

I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind.

Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet.