Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself. I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

I am a simple man, though my wife says I am complicated. I'll trust her on that one.

When I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice.

Anyway, he's gone. Which, as you know, is how I like my men.

If I'm committed to something really stupid, then I'm in a comedy.

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.

Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.

If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up.

There must be more malice than love in the hearts of all wits.

The next minute or so was spent howling on the ceiling . Imp No.1 joined in, but he wasn't really feeling it. It shouldn't be "Who do we hate?", he thought, it really should be "whom", but this probably wasn't a good time to bring that up.

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

Maturity is having the ability to escape categorization.

I'll just take amusement at being a paradox.

I respect everything I make fun of.

If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?

I despise followers of any kind, especially those who follow me.

You might be a redneck if someone tells you you have something in your teeth, and you take them out to see what it is.

Men love watches with multiple functions. My husband has one that is a combination address book, telescope and piano.

I regard everything with irony, including the face I see in the mirror when I wake up in the morning.

What happens, I think, is especially for comic effect you find something about yourself that you don't like. You exaggerate it, and it's funny.

I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.

Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.

HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.