Anthony Trollope Quotes

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

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

Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.

Comedy is a great weapon of attack. It's not a great weapon of support.

It is difficult not to write satire.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

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

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.

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

Effective satire has to be almost identical to the subject that it is skewering.

I see the absurdity in things, and I think it's my job to point it out.

A lot of French comedy is satire.

It's a challenge to do satire when the thing you're satirizing is almost beyond satire, but I think that's a challenge for everybody.

Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet.

In general satire, every man perceives A slight attack, yet neither fears nor grieves.

Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.

Satire is tragedy plus time.

Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier's purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr'd, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

Satire should, like a polished razor keen, Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

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

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire.