Mark Twain Quotes

A sense of humor is rare. It isn't telling a joke about how there are three ways to get to heaven. It's being in a restaurant and hearing someone say, Everyone's got their tale of woe, and then turning around and saying, Unfortunately, in life, there's more woe than tail.

By the way, I'm funniest when I'm not being funny. I'm better to laugh at than with, pretty much.

Humor is a show of both strength and of vulnerability: you are willing to make the first move but you are trusting in the response of your listener.

English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.

Humor makes our heavy burdens light and smoothes the rough spots in our pathways.

Comedy is the result of what's happening, not what people are doing. Because if people are doing comedy. It's embarrassing. The individual elements have to be straight-faced, serious, realistic with a firm basis. What makes it comedy is a somewhat shifted way to put it together.

I'm just the least funny person in a room full of funny people, which is basically every single day of work for me.

Not all cartoon humor is just about having bugged-out eyes and tongues flying out of people's heads.

The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.

Most of what's tricky about comedy is the perception of it and the audience's expectation.

If you want to make people laugh, your face must remain serious.

I have a very dry sense of humor.

Judd Apatow, Conan O'Brien ... taking what you think is funny, and then adding another layer to it. That's kind of my sensibility. Those are the guys that make me laugh.

There are many different ways of being funny. I'm not sure that there's so many different ways of being dramatic.

I'm naturally inclined to want to be funny and make people laugh, and that's what I want to do with my life. I also want to do it on an intelligent level. I want to kill the clown but I also want to preserve the comedian.

There is humor that's just whimsy, that we smile at, but the humor that we laugh at, someone has to be - someone's dignity has to be reduced.

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, it's events, light itself, and the positive it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction, that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

I think I just want to leave my mark in some way. I hope I leave the world a better place than it was when I came, and I think the best way I can do that is through acting and writing, and hopefully it will make a difference someday.

writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind.

Humor is based on surprise, and surprise is a milder way of saying shock. It's surprise that makes the joke.

An artist is someone with the gift to light up a dark room.

We, the comics that we like, we're all, like, post-humor.