V. S. Pritchett Quotes

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

I always found that drama, really good drama, has a lot of comedy in it.

I did 'Love's Labour's Lost' in the theater and found it to be riotously funny.

I find Spike Jones' movies to be really very inventive and funny, but they're really sad and touching and really key into the different facets of the human experience.

I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can't have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor.

I always felt like the best comedy came out of sadness, and some of my favourite shows growing up - a lot of my influences - have these very sad characters and treat that sadness seriously while also being very funny.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

I'm a comedian. I make comic films and there are certain ideas that occur to me that are comic, with heavy, serious undertones. There are some ideas that are more frivolous to me. The next idea that could occur to me could be comedy about death and famine or something.

I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.

I think Georges Feydeau said comedy is just tragedy speeded up.

I'm naturally inclined to want to be funny and make people laugh, and that's what I want to do with my life. I also want to do it on an intelligent level. I want to kill the clown but I also want to preserve the comedian.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

With comedians, you have that understanding that we're trying to get laughs.

Comedy becomes intensified in short scenes.

I've always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.

I think comedy, so much of it comes out of the strange sort of golden instant 'cause you don't know why it's funny, but you captured it.

It's really challenging to play comedy.

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.

I'm such a comedy fan that I just love laughing and so admire comedians who have brought me joy.

I love physical comedy. I love Oscar Wilde, I love Shakespeare comedies, I love improv.

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

By the very nature of satire or parody, you have to love and respect your target and respect it enough to understand every aspect of it, so you can more effectively make fun of it.

I know the nature of comedy, and you never know what will happen with the next movie or whether people will find it funny.