Vernor Vinge Quotes

Comedy comes from confusion.

What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.

This is the most unheard of thing that I have ever heard of

Ironic things are interesting.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.

I will tell you King's First Law of Recognition: You never get it when you want it, and then when it comes, you get too much.

Life is never free of contradictions.

I'm definitely a fan of juxtaposition. Using the most beautiful line to say the most horrific thing - I think one of the main things in songwriting is definitely friction between the words and the melody.

Every anarchist is a baffled dictator.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Fascism means war.

The essence of comedy, drama, and horror is surprise. I have an uncanny ability to surprise people because they look at my face, and they don't know where I'm going.

When you really boil it down, what comedy does is you expect one thing, and you get a totally different thing that's humorous, and we all laugh. That's generally how, just mechanically - super-distilled - comedy works.

In general, I like contradictions and complex situations.

Life can be very strange.

I don't think anyone would disagree with the conclusion that Saddam [Hussein] was a terrible dictator. He had gassed his own people and his neighbors. He had killed thousands of people, and he had started a couple of wars and destroyed his country.

"Oh!" said my aunt, "I was not aware at first to whom I had the pleasure of objecting."

As soon as the war ended, we located the one spot on earth that hadn't been touched by the war and blew it to hell.

Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory.

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth.

And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred, and in the way it is carried out.