Alice Thomas Ellis Quotes

I'm a bug on acting, which distinguishes Second City from a lot of other revues. It comes from the character, the behavior, and not from the jokes. I don't think jokes are funny. Humor comes out of character and out of situations the character is in.

When I was in high school, I took French. I barely passed and didn't learn anything at all. There was a joke among me and my friends in the class that nothing sounded more ridiculous than a guy with a country accent speaking French.

We generally learn languages for the benefit of reading the books written in them

I came to America when I was seven and a half in 91. I think the first full length book in English that I read was Return to Oz when I was nine years old.

It's fun when the writers start writing jokes to you, but also it's fun when the writers will come to you and say 'Hey, listen, we're working on this story and we need to know if you speak any foreign languages.' And I said 'No, I don't. I speak a little Spanish, but I can learn a foreign language.' And they go 'Okay, do you think you can learn Portuguese?' And I go 'Yeah, whatever it takes. If it's funny, I'll do it.' So of course I start looking online and learning Portuguese, and as it turns out, I get the script and it's now Serbian.

I had the advantage, that I know Swedish. So I had the Swedish book and I had a lot of English translations, and German translations, and I did everything to make the best English translation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie I could. And then, there I went. "Oh! I think she's thinking this, but I think she should say it!" And so on. It's wonderful to do that.

Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again. When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country. It doesn't matter how educated they are. By living in the world and living their experiences, they bring extraordinary truths. I try to do those truths justice.

God gave me this great book to preach from, and if He has put anything in it you think is not fit, go and complain to Him, not to me. I am simply his servant, and if His errand that I am to tell is objectionable, I cannot help it.

I didn't grow up speaking Spanish, and the interesting thing was, we would watch these novelas and you didn't have to speak Spanish to understand what was going on.

Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you’re at the end of the book, and it’s only the end of a chapter.

I'll try to communicate, Taylor said. She spoke slowly and deliberately. Hello! We need help. Is your village close? My village is Denver. And I think it's a long way from here. I'm Nicole Ade. Miss Colorado. We have a Colorado where we're from too! Tiara said. She swiveled her hips, spread her arms wide, then brought her hands together prayer-style and bowed. Kipa aloha. Nicole stared. I speak English. I'm American. Also, did you learn those moves from Barbie's Hawaiian Vacation DVD? Ohmigosh, yes! Do your people have that, too?

I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman was one of those books I read in my mid-twenties that was life-changing. I think I had a very black-and-white view of Marie Antoinette before, but in reading that book, I developed a lot of empathy for her. She was just caught up in history. There was no place for a woman to do anything at that time anyway.

You understand that the piggies are animals, and you no more condemn them for murdering Libo and Pipo than you condemn a cabra for shewing up capim." That's right," said Miro. Ender smiled. "And that's why you'll never learn anything from them. Because you think of them as animals.

I had to learn a skill set. I think I had the materials to be a good comedy writer.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.

But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party - whose members for the most part come from the ghetto - seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people's language.

I'm not thinking in any big thematic or conceptual terms - especially in this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] when I was trying to make the voices more active, more energetic.

True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.

My book came out; and people began to think that topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all.

I think as soon as I figured out - and this must have been incredibly young - that comic books were made by humans, rather than being natural phenomenon likes trees or rocks, I just wanted to be one of the people who did that. So I was copying all kinds of cartoons that I was reading, comic books, and eventually learned how to draw cartoon books step-by-step and just, I don't know, I'm not an especially quick learner, but I sure was a dedicated one.

I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.

One of the problems and the reason why Carolyn [Maloney ] wrote the book, the Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated is that some people think we have made it when we have not and there's much to be done.

It's usually very, very hard for me to pick up a script that was written and try and see myself as a part of that, especially when you're used to performing all your own material. It's OK with drama, I like being handed great material but I think with comedy it's far more personal and probably a lot harder for me to find a fit.

I do think there are always ways to create what seem like insurmountable powers, but then suddenly you find their limitations and that's the nature of comic book storytelling - always has been.