Anna Quindlen Quotes

A rich man's joke is always funny.

It is difficult not to write satire.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives.

When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, "the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as 'the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery'," and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of "the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends.

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.

The end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction; and he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender than the physician to the patient when he prescribes harsh remedies.

People have a sense of humor, even if it's not a good one, and everybody has stakes.

I wanted to do something in the style of a comedy of manners.

If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.

There's always been this tradition of satirizing these rich groups of people.

I've known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant.

We do not take humor seriously enough.

Being a comedy writer gives you permission to be an outsider and poke fun at what people think about other people.

No, I was not born with a monocle in my eye.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

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.

Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.

I like to write a lot of satire.

Laughter is the best way to get over something or get closer to something. It's one of the things I respect most about Amy Schumer. She's found a way to get us closer to ourselves and see the ugly side of humanity, but not in a way that's pointing a finger or that's angry. She does it in a way that makes us see the absurdity and laugh at it.

The wealthy don't have any sense of humor. It's not like the English, where the theater is perhaps the one place where they have a sense of humor about themselves.

Albert Brooks. Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Larry David. The best comedic actors play broad and real simultaneously, coming across as both larger than life and all too human.

I think I'm funnier in my writing than in person.

'The Big Lebowski' gave me my first false sense of intellectual superiority.

Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?" "The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.