Pedro Almodovar Quotes

The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it's a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he's broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it's not a joke anymore.

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!

I trained in Shakespeare, and that's all comedy, even when it's tragedy.

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.

I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

In life, comedy occurs naturally, as it should, in the most appalling of circumstances.

Life is dramatic and comedic at times. Sometimes in the most dramatic situations, there is comedy. And good comedy comes from a sense of reality.

In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.

I think Canadians are great satirists because we sit in the middle of these two giants: Great Britain and the U.S.

I grew up speaking Spanish. The woman who helped raise me was only Spanish-speaking, so it was one of my primary languages as a kid. And I lived in Spain for a while.

Our everyday lives exist with comedy and tragedy next to each other.

To me, some of the funniest movies would be probably categorized in the dramatic genre, and likewise, some of the most dramatic films, or films that have the most dramatic moments, are in comedies.

Comedy comes from tragedy, and being Iranian in America from 1979 on had been quite tragic. In stand-up comedy, I was able to take the reality and exaggerate it.

My whole life, I've always had one foot in the classical world and one foot in the rock, pop, and folk world.

That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?

I find life a mix of humor and pathos, and all my books reflect that to one degree or another.

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.

The thing with 'No Man's Land' is not to see it, but how to make people to go to see it. The one negative criticism I've heard is that the relationship between tragedy and comedy is so perfect that it becomes suspicious. I take it as a complement.

I wanted to do comedy because I left Malaysia and went to America. I got bitten by the Western, idealist, opinionated, democracy bug.

When I think about Plastic Man, he was genuinely the first funny super hero. I'm obviously attracted to that. There's also this great mixture of tragedy in there, too, that I love. The humor comes from a place of pain.

To me, when something's really funny, there's, like, a wildness to it, and it's very close to the wildness of something potentially tragic or gross. It's all very close to each other when you have that extreme level of feeling.