Robert Lopez Quotes

I think any decent comedy worth its salt has to have heart, otherwise it's just a bunch of jokes. I think people enjoy comedies that have a heart and soul to them.

I had a strong vision for 'The Best Man Holiday,' so I was able to translate that to the actors and ultimately to the screen. Things can't get too heavy or too outrageously funny; it has to strike a balance. Tone is everything. If you've set the right tone, you can get away with a lot of stuff. You can get away with making people cry.

If you can have heart as well as the comedy, it takes you a lot further. I think that that's what we were trying to do with 'Gigi.'

You can channel a lot within a comic framework, and I think 'The Guard' had a lot going on outside of the comedy, which is satisfying.

A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it.

I love films that make you feel something but also deliver that payload behind jokes.

I think it helped that 'Fleabag' had such a dramatic arc to it, even though it was disguised as a comedy.

Paul Taylor's 'Offenbach Overtures' has lots of zip and charm, and its pair of dueling soldiers in red, who end up starry-eyed about each other while their disgusted seconds take up the quarrel, is nonstop funny.

Once we got over the origin story, we could really delve deeper into their lives and characters and angst. So this movie actually has more heart, more humor.

Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling, but there's another message in there, which is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.

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

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

I love funny women. I love writing funny women characters.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

I think funny is just the foundation. I don't really think, to some extent, funny is the absolute most important thing. It should also communicate some idea through the medium of cartooning. Just to be funny is... You know what, the things that you laugh hardest at aren't cartoons.

All I want to do is write songs about funny characters I made up.

You put funny people in funny costumes and paint them green and we could talk about anything we wanted to, because that was the only thing that fascinated Gene about this particular genre.

To me, the musical is best when it's a musical comedy. So if you have a very, very funny show, and very good, funny songs, that's what the musical does best.

In a comedy, after the day is done, you can figure out ways of how to make it even funnier for the next day. In dramas, it's very different - the mindset that you're in.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

I guess that is my favorite thing - to make people laugh and also to maybe engage them emotionally and touch them somehow in telling the story.

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.

The reason I'm writing funny books is that I wish there were more.

'Friends' played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.