Comedy Writing Quotes

I was completely unqualified to get into Harvard. But then I went to my interview for Harvard, and the woman asked, 'Why do you want to go here?' And I took out all of my comedy writing samples that I had done. I couldn't have been more delusional in terms of what I thought they wanted in a candidate for college. ~ Mike Birbiglia

I love a good laugh as well, I think that's so important in life, which is probably why I've dabbled in comedy writing as well as horror. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile it's the most special thing in the world. ~ Paul Kane

Comedy writing is taking the brief thought and going with it. ~ Chris O'Dowd

The spectacle of a judge pouring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests, and then attempting to write an opinion which explains the difference between that nude and some other nude has elements of low comedy. ~ Thurman Arnold

Deeply funny musings and adventures elevate Paul Rudnick to the highest level of American comedy writing. ~ Steve Martin

I used to forget that I was an Indian woman. I would even forget that I was a woman. I don't think of myself as bringing to the table a lot of 'women's issues.' I don't feel the need to write about maternity. I grew up thinking that the talented people in comedy were hard-joke writers. ~ Mindy Kaling

I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all. ~ George Lopez

I really love writing comedy. Writing romantic comedy is even nicer because you get to write about how insane we all act when we're falling in love. ~ Pearl Cleage

I love '30 Rock.' It's one of my favorite shows. It's certainly the gold standard of comedy writing. ~ Dan Harmon

Most of my comedy writing happens through improvisation on stage; doing it in the moment. ~ Marc Maron

The function of my comedy is not to provide answers, but to postulate questions, impertinent questions and therefore finally, pertinent questions. Not to open doors, merely to unlock them. To not invade the boundaries of probability but stabd a cool guard this side of the boundaries. Somewhere between there's a thesis. To pump up the muscle of dialectic (or in my case Di-Eclectic!) against the brawn of surrealistic solution.

I play not Hamlet, but the second gravedigger, not Lear but the fool. ~ Marty Feldman

The Lampoon was definitely quite formative. You know there's a crazy like kind of network of comedy writers from The Lampoon that are, that kind of you know like Seinfeld and The Simpsons and a lot of shows kind of had a lot of kind of Lampoon writers and so that was very formative. I mean, to me I got interested in comedy writing at an early like reading like Dave Barry. ~ Nicholas Stoller

Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own. ~ Megan Amram

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. ~ John Fowles

I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything. ~ Charles De Lint

You're going to have people who are going to say 'Oh, you know like, she just writes songs about her ex-boyfriends' and I think frankly that's a very sexist angle to take. No one says that about Ed Sheeran. No one says it about Bruno Mars. They're all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love-life, and no one raises a red flag there. ~ Taylor Swift

Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here ... and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world ... ~ Colin Thubron

For me writing and filmmaking is a therapeutic process. It reflects themes that I'm going through at a time in my life. ~ Mark Webber

When I became more involved in music, I had to give up some of my writing in the literary sense. However, on occasion, I would write something for my own pleasure or I would write notes and introductory remarks in the songbooks I put together. ~ Tom Glazer

I really only have been seriously writing, finishing things and publishing things since January '91. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. ~ Aristotle.

You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,
Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy
Laughter at the right moment, over the wine. ~ Callimachus

You need to understand that a skilled professional songwriter can accelerate your success as an already talented musician. These people are writing every single day, so their craft is really sharp, and it's the best songwriters who consistently get on the radio. ~ Kara DioGuardi

For years in football I was angry with the game, angry with pundits and, a lot of the time, angry with the journalists writing about me. All that changed when I got my break in movies. ~ Vinnie Jones

A letter is never ill-timed; it never interrupts. Instead it waits for us to find the opportune minute, the quiet moment to savor the message. There is an element of timelessness about letter writing ... ~ Lois Wyse

There are some things I would like to say through my writing. It is there in those things where my writing is born, and then breathes on it's own. ~ Roger Raffee

Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforth these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor - closet dramas, psychological dramas, sex dramas, etc., but by God important dramas, containing nothing but Big Thinks. Ten years late, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but the space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes. ~ Leigh Brackett

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature - at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes - is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. ~ Lewis Carroll

I am sorry this became, a poem
I beg you, please do not think as blame
Trust me as you trust god
I am your friend, in pain
This insane writing, which turned into poem ~ Santosh Kalwar

Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile. ~ Erica Jong

As I read my poems aloud, I paid still more attention to sound in my writing. One morning as I revised, I set down a word that I knew was not right, and I heard myself think: But I can say it so that it's right. Immediately, I knew that I had understood one of the hazards of reading aloud. Performance can paper over bad writing, or substitute for the best language. Performance is a problem, and most performance poets or slammers are actors or standup comedians and not poets; we never hear a line break and seldom a new metaphor. There are other problems with the popularity of the poetry reading, but largely the reading has been good for poetry because poets watch their own poems come back to them on the faces of listeners. One addresses not only the Muse but actual people. ~ Donald Hall

I really like the "two is better than three" line. People ask me is this drama or comedy? I just think the more colors you have to a film the better. The more genres, the more people will like it. I like relating to the whole general speaking public. The script itself is 99 pages but the novel it is based on is 600. I had to leave a lot of stuff out of the script. I had a limitation of what I could present on the big screen. ~ Tommy Wiseau

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing. ~ Tobias Wolff

My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work. ~ George Saunders

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

i prefer to think of the good times. Like when you held my hair as I was vomiting into a bucket. ~ Leigh Bardugo

When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, 'I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now.' I said, 'Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.' That promise of his put me off. ~ John Cage

If you wish to write, write. ~ Epictetus

I block in days / nights for writing where I don't touch emails or social media. ~ Julia Woodman

Someone like Katy Perry - I like her writing because I listen to music as a songwriter. I like a lot of her songs - like, 'Firework' is a song that I think I could write. ~ Jimmy Cliff

He has a frightening aversion to text messaging in general.
"It's a phone. It's for making calls, not for writing novels". ~ Patrick Carman

Very well, I promise. So, what did you get for me?" Angeline paused for a beat. "Jeans." "What?" croaked Artemis. "And a T-shirt" ... Artemis took several breaths. "Does the T-shirt have any writing on it?" A rustling of paper crackled through the phone's speakers. "Yes, it's so cool. There's a picture of a boy who for some reason has no neck and only three fingers on each hand, and behind him in this sort of graffiti style is the words RANDOMOSIY. I don't know what that means but it sounds really current." Randomosity though Artemis, and he felt like weeping. ~ Eoin Colfer

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself. ~ Wally Lamb

Writing is a struggle against silence. ~ Carlos Fuentes

How does one become a writer, Harry?
By never giving up. You know, Marcus, that freedom-the desire for freedom-is a war in itself. We live in a society of defeated office workers, and to get ourselves out of this fix, we must fight-against ourselves and against the whole world. Freedom is a constant battle of which we are barely even aware. I will never give up. ~ Joel Dicker

I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it. ~ Margery Allingham

All the genres are so blended nowadays. There are lots of comedies out there that are more realistic than dramas, and some dramas out there that are so broad and wacky that they don't even pass for a broad, wacky comedy. ~ Madeline Zima

I don't want to write a book which will bring me fame for just an hour. I will try to write something which may not be very popular but it may last forever. ~ Debasish Mridha

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin. ~ John Irving

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook - a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. ~ Virginia Woolf

We are each the star of our own situation comedy, and, with luck, the screwball friend in somebody else's. ~ Robert Breault

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently. ~ James A. Baldwin

I really didn't think about song writing. ~ Adam Rich

It's a finger snapping kind of day. ~ Coco J. Ginger