Humor Writing Quotes

My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.

I bought a book of Mark Twain quotes. That's about my speed. I'll read a couple quotes and put it down.

My most frequent collaborators at S.N.L. are the incredibly gifted writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider!

I went through a phase where people would introduce me at parties as a cartoonist, and everybody felt sorry for me. 'Oh, Matt's a cartoonist.' Then people further feeling sorry for me would ask me to draw Garfield. Because I'm a cartoonist, draw Snoopy or Garfield or something.

Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.

I think I'm a good joke writer. I'm also very scared that the last joke I wrote is the last joke I'll ever write.

One reason I didn't trust my writing for so long was that I always considered myself a serious dramatic actor. But people would always laugh when I shared my writing with them. It took my husband to help me see that I really am part humorist.

I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track.

As soon as I realized you could be funny as a job, that was the job I wanted.

Woody Allen's 'The Complete Prose' - It's just the best selection of comic writing by one author. You know it's good comedy when you get quite demoralised about yourself.

What I wrote all the time when I was a kid - I don't want to call it 'poetry,' because it wasn't poetry. I was not that kind of a writer. I was a rhymer. I was a fan of Dorothy Parker's, so maybe I wrote poetry to that extent, but my main focus was the humor of it, and word construction, and the slant. Your words, it's a very powerful experience.

Your average sitcom writer is a very intellectual person.

A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.

The family sitcom has been around forever, since the advent of television. I don't need to reinvent it. But if you take something and you do it in a way that you haven't necessarily seen before, that's right where I live.

I thought about trying to do a strip. I even tried to do it, but I felt I didn't have the voice. Even though I liked that form, I didn't think I thought in the form of the three panels.

Daft Wee Stories' is, as the title says, daft wee stories. I just sort of rattled them out, tried to make them quite funny, with punchlines - they're kind of like sketches.

My showbiz career started with 'SNL,' and to write an 'SNL' book... well, there are already enough of those.

People say that the best part about doing animation is that you don't have to dress up to go to work, but I don't believe that. I dress up to go to work. I dress up for an airplane. I think it's just focusing your skillset, focusing on your voice and the comedy.

It's hard enough to be a lady writer. Doubly hard to be a funny lady writer.

I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.

My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.

Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don't think in terms of comic dialogue.

You take from things that you read about in the news or things you hear about or things that happen to you, and you collectively sit in a room with everyone, and everyone decides what the funniest stories are that you've heard or thought of.

The strangest thing about writing a sitcom, is never knowing if it will become anything but words on a page.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.