Satirical Writing Quotes

It seems like there's a lot of people who just do not understand satire. They think it's weird. There's people who just don't understand you portray something or just explore a character, it means you're condoning it, saying this is the way to live.

What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?

When you're laughing aloud at David Sedaris' every sentence, it's easy to miss the more serious side of what he's up to.

But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.

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.

I was very involved in political satire, and I'd been writing parody for 'Mad' and 'National Lampoon,' so I made up some strange story about Gerald Ford.

As a former writer for the 'National Lampoon,' I've probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.

The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.

In his life, [Dalton] Trumbo uses wit and comedy to fight these very high-stakes battles.

If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.

Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another.

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel.

Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books.

Bad times for the Republic are great times for satire.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

I like whimsy and satire, and that's what Americans like so much about Brits. We bring subtlety and sense of humor that you sometimes lack. We have a very long history of importing Brits like Christopher Hitchens who are better at it than Americans are.

I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that - humorists they are sometimes called - are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.

I like to write a lot of satire.

The Dark Satirist, like the Dark Knight - that could be a good name for a superhero.

I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.

We've always been interested in the commentary on politics and society and how comedy always sort of cuts that with a nice laugh, and the perspective it brings.

In the present state of the world it is difficult not to write lampoons.

I spent 11 years at 'The Daily Show,' and I learned everything there about how to write funny, how to write funny on topic.