Francois Truffaut Quotes

I like to think my sense of humor is sort of smart and dumb at the same time. I like to work on multiple levels - smart and dumb, funny and sad, profound and mundane, cynical and hopeful.

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.

Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music. But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things.

I think people have a hard time dealing with a bunch of things at once. They can't have something be disturbing and funny at the same time. They can't have that kind of combination. Which is weird to me because I feel complicated about most things.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.

I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.

My eyes went blank, and I stared off, and the music started. It was raining, and the sun was shining at the same time, and there were these big bay windows, and there was the blue in the sky, and the sun on the trees, and it was drizzling.

There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there's no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime.

I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there's always a little cynical undertone, there's always something that undercuts things.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

It's a funny old world.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy.

I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don't really need a distinction between them.

Life is funny, at the same time being totally harsh.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

I call myself the Amusement Park. That's because I'm funny and scary at the same time.

All the things that I find beautiful have a darkness about them.

I think we're all good and bad, but good's not funny. Bad is funny. Suppress the good and let the bad out, and then you can be funny.

It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great.

I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it's crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it's laughing. Nowadays, we would say, 'How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.'

A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.

We may smile at these matters, but they are melancholy illustrations.

One is never ready for success. It consecrates and looses you at the same time.