Tragedy and Comedy Quotes

I don't think it's a contradiction to find painfulness funny.

The way that I live is in between the dual experiences of the tragedy mask and the comedy mask. I feel that I write best and think best in between those two masks.

I don't do Shakespeare. I don't talk in that kind of broken English.

I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.

I try to think about Shakespeare, leap year, the Beatles.

There is a point in portraying surface vulgarity where tragedy and comedy are very close.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare over the years. You start to realise how the plays fit together; he's always using pieces from one and slotting them into others.

Anything one can do to provoke and inspire an interest in the works of Shakespeare in a young audience is fair game. Anything.

Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.

But it is only in epic tragedies that gloom is unrelieved. In real life tragedy and comedy are so intermingled that when one is most wretched ridiculous things happen to make one laugh in spite of oneself.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

I've had tragedy in my life, and it doesn't stop comedy, so I think it's important to do both. Particularly in a superhero movie, but in any movie that accesses all people. Nobody wants to be abused for two hours.

Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what's serious. I think that's true. Sometimes things are really funny if you're absolutely earnest. If you're really serious, it's hilarious.

Funny and sad are two sides of the same coin. I think that most comedians are able to tap into deep subject matter.

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.