Diana Rigg Quotes

The best comedy, I feel, comes in a drama because it balances each other out.

I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.

Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

I love ghost stories but kind of left them alone after my teens and came back to it after playing Heathcliff in 'Wuthering Heights' on the radio.

I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

I'm a tragedienne in some way. I think quite epically. I like epic landscapes and grand emotions.

Chuck Lorre and everyone else on 'Mom' did such a great job of balancing that line that rides tragedy and comedy. They make you cry, and then they make you crack up about it.

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.

There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.

Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.

People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically.

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!

I find things funny that aren't self-aware. That don't know they're funny, and I think the same can hold true for drama. If you think you're in this tragedy and you play it for tragedy, there's a self-awareness there that I think takes you out of watching it and I believe it cuts both ways.

She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

Frequently my life has been likened to a Greek tragedy, and the actress in me cannot deny that comparison.

A laughing Lear would be monstrous. Not so a laughing Romeo and Juliet.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

C’est moi, c’est moi,’tis I,' I told him. It seemed appropriately melodramatic, though I didn’t know if he’d catch the reference. I shouldn’t have worried. Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Trust you to quote Lancelot rather than Guinevere.

But our comedies never endured long without a tragedy.

Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.