John C. Reilly Quotes

Some people would say comedy draws from some dark places, from your dark stuff. Life's great optimists aren't necessarily the funniest people.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.

Sometimes every single element of a character is a torturous discovery.

It's way more fun to tell jokes for an hour than it is to sit in a room and bash your head against the wall trying to think of sketches.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

I'm not against people just being funny or telling stories. I don't need to delve into the soft, dark core all the time. If it happens, it happens.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

Writing is a sad process, sitting on your ass for many, many hours, alone in a room, smelling like coffee, sadness and bitterness, and watching your youth leave.

To this day writing is the most painful thing to do.

Writing I think, out of what all of us do, writing is the hardest. You're the only who start with nothing except what's up here. You do that. It's really hard I think, acting is not.

I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness.

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.

Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

I'm generally not a social dramatist or comedy writer. My interests have always been more in psychological stories or personal relations and comic ideas.

When you're doing standup you're kind of doing, "Hey. I thought of this. This may be funny.

Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without your even asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.

I think someday you're going to be a great writer," he said. "But" he added maliciously, "first you'll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet. You only think you've suffered. You've got to fall in love first.

Writing is the great skill, the creative skill. The acting is more an interpretative skill. And the thrill for me is the moment when I think of something. And then the challenge is how to get that funny idea to work in terms of the structure and that kind of thing, which is - and that's what I really love doing.

People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

I love writing stand-up so much and tinkering and looking for ideas.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.