Martin McDonagh Quotes

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

I believe humor nullifies violence.

I think it would be exhausting and depressing, to write, to watch and to live, if it was just focused on drama. It's heavy. Also, I think the humor really highlights the pathos and the struggle. You can slam it up against drama, and it makes both shine.

I love those people who do story-telling and who ramble on, but I don't do that, I tell jokes - the sort of jokes that anyone really could tell in the pub.

People think I'll kill you if you make a joke. I compare it to Clint Eastwood. I've only seen Clint Eastwood in movies. You think if you make a joke to Eastwood, he might shoot you.

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together. If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn't be real.

I feel like I've been blessed. I see the world through stories.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

A friend of mine is trying to do a documentary where he brings Jewish and Arab comedians to occupied territories in Israel. He wants to do shows as a way of finding some comedic common denominator. When he proposed the idea to one of the officials at the Jenin refuge camp, the guy just stared at him and said, "This is not a joke to us. We don't think that laughing is the answer."

I will do almost anything for the sake of a joke or for the sake of someone's real belief in something to help tell a story.

I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off. Also, a comic vision is my natural world view, but I've grown up in spite of myself and I can pass the comic twist if it detracts from what the characters need. Yes, the life of a saint is hard.

Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It's also where the comedy is, which I'm interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well.

For me, suspense doesn't have any value if it's not balanced by humor.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.

When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I either wanted to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be.

I don't think I'd have done comedy if I was born eighty years ago I'd have been a lord. Shooting people that were on my land With a wig, yeah. And some crisps.

I think you gotta have some humor [in your story]. People gotta have a moment to laugh and feel that it's not taken 100% serious. That's important.

Levity, you need levity to feel anything. You need to laugh before you cry. I think films that take themselves too seriously without any levity are missing an important ingredient to the potential emotional impact of their stories.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

As long as I could hold a pencil, I was drawing and telling stories and making jokes. I've just been lucky that no one ever stopped me, and now I can do that for a living.

It's important not to take yourself too seriously, ... and I think sometimes people take us a lot more seriously than we take ourselves, especially when it comes to politics. Politics, for me, is a reflection of the world I live in. But love is just as important as politics to me. They both exist in the world, you know? And if you don't reflect the entire world around you, then you're leaving something out.

I think people who do comedy tend to do it well, and to do it painfully and truthfully. So making the leap to drama is easier for them because everything they've done is from pain anyway.

I don't know if I was always an open person, but I think stand-up comics specifically have this way of running towards embarrassing things - whereas regular people tend to run away - because the embarrassing story is always going to be the really funny story.