Karl Kraus Quotes

It is difficult not to write satire.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

I like to write a lot of satire.

I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

Satire recoils whenever charged too high; round your own fame the fatal splinters fly.

When people started reading me and talking to me about the work, they didn't say how funny, or how satiric, or how brilliant, or how this or how that, they said, how'd you get away with it? How'd you get that into print?

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change.

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

We don't really see a lot of comedic moments in '24.' In fact, I haven't seen all of it, but from what I have seen, I don't know if I've ever laughed at anything that anyone has done on '24.'

Satire can always be found everywhere. A people without love for satire is a dead people.

Comedians are obsessed with justice and the truth.

Satire, whether it be satire or not, everything has to have boundaries.

I exaggerate all our selves, our beings. I make fun of everything: of our life and what we are. But I don't tell jokes, really. I just exaggerate life, and it comes out funny.

We make fun of our leaders.

It's an old Elizabethan idea. The fool is the only one who is allowed to make fun of the king because he is a fool. I can say whatever I want about anybody else because I'm just an idiot talking - I'm not insisting that I'm any smarter than anyone else. It's satire.

A little irreverence is always important to being a columnist. I try to do that.

It's dangerous talking about comedy; it gets to be very tedious and presumptuous.

I think satire is most effective when you love the thing you're satirizing rather than... have a vendetta against it.

It's hard to go back and be constantly funny.

I find it really appalling when people talk about comedy.

Most of what I write is comedy.

Comedy is hard. Any idiot can have an opinion.

I think it's legitimate to do satire. If you're going to write a book of satire on Marilyn Monroe or Madonna, you're not going to get their permission, because you're going to make fun of them!

Mike Judge is my Jonathan Swift, and I say that because I don't know any other satirists. But the problem with satire is that it's so easily misinterpreted.

I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.