Eric Idle Quotes

I did years of summer stock. I sort of only wanted to be an actor. And then at 19, I was funny, and I had some of these bits that I did for friends, and I immediately could get on television.

To develop your own voice, you have to keep writing a ton, and this is something where I think Twitter is helpful. I use it to write a ton of jokes. You have to write a ton of bad stuff before you know what you're good at. And that's what some people I think have trouble with, the thought of getting past the bad stuff.

I got into comedy because I wanted to get into writing.

I sat down and wrote some jokes and went to the talent show, got up on stage, fell in love with it and never turned back.

I can work as a writer, but I wanted to do stand-up. And I knew I could, at worst, work as a stand-up. And I like to travel, and I knew I wanted to do an hour special, so in order to get ready for that, I had to hit the road.

I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That's still what I am doing. The end.

The only way to learn writing is by writing. Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process. Work is 80 per cent. The remaining 8 per cent is 'luck' or 'zeitgeist' - in short, things that are not in our hands.

Because there is no better tool for writing than experience. It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.

Songwriting is a muscle. The more you do it, the better you get at it.

I wanted to do screenwriting. That's what I went to school for, but my major was overfilled, and when I got 'The Daily Show', I was a semester away from officially starting my major, so I never started that in particular.

I think I probably would have gone into stand-up.

Before I went to a meeting at the 'Harvard Lampoon,' I had no idea that there was even a comedy magazine at Harvard, let alone that you could write comedy potentially for a living.

I started comedy as a hobby, really, and it still doesn't seem like a proper job.

No, I never really set out to be a stand up. I wanted to be a writer of some sort. I thought I'd do a bit of stand up and hopefully that will lead to stuff and little did I know it kind of snowballed. Before I knew it I was doing stand up 300 nights a year.

I'd been doing standup since college.

When I first started out, I kinda just wanted to do comedy stuff, and thankfully, I had a fair amount of success. I've been able to be on, I think, almost virtually every American sitcom.

I had been writing and performing stand-up comedy pretty much the entire time I worked at Google.

I also had Elliot Gould and Martin Short and Nasim Pedrad - let alone Zack Pearlman who is going to be a huge star, as is Seaton Smith - out there and I love writing for them and just sitting back and watching them be excellent. And when you are sitting across from Elliott Gould sharing a scene it just raises your game.

I wrote on the Grammys, and a few times for Garry Shandling when he was hosting. I couldn't have enjoyed those gigs more, because I would get to collaborate and try to make people I looked up to laugh, but for the most part, when you're as talented as they are, what they really want is someone who can type fast and whose presence makes them feel in the mood to write and spew and be creative, and I was a good person to have in the room.

I met Jon Lovett, who was just coming off of three years of being a presidential speech writer and had just arrived here to be a comedy writer in Hollywood. I thought he was super green, in terms of this world, but he knows so much about the world that we're attempting to write about.

Writing is something that I practice at every day to get better at.

I was writing for live television. And I said to myself, someday, soon as I can, I have got to do a situation comedy.

Being a TV comedian, actor, writer, columnist, and all that is quite helpful to me in acquiring wide varieties of knowledge, which is crucial for filmmaking.

I love to write humor. If I could make a living doing it that is all I would write.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.