A Quote by Dylan Moran

I don't watch a whole lot of stand up. Mainly I prefer to read writers; they make me laugh the most. Something gets you when you're alone and someone's voice is coming through their work. There's a different quality to it that stays with you a bit more.

Dylan Moran

Quote Topics

Alone Bit Coming Different Gets Laugh Lot Mainly Make Make Me Laugh Me More Most Prefer Quality Read Someone Something Stand Stand Up Stays Through Up Voice Watch Whole Work Writers

Quote Author

Dylan Moran
Irish - Comedian
Born: November 3, 1971

I dont watch a whole lot of stand up. Mainly I prefer to read writers; they make me laugh the most. Something gets you when youre alone and someones voice is coming through their work. Theres a different quality to it that stays with you a bit more.

Dylan Moran

There are certain writers I can't read when I'm trying to write because their voices are so distinct. Cormac McCarthy, he's the most different writer from anything I've ever written, but there's something about those really spare sentences that is just tough - it would be too much of an influence. Grace Paley is my favorite writer. Her stuff is so voice-driven, when I read her a lot I want to make my writing more voice-y and dialogue-heavy. I love a lot of stuff in translation.

Molly Antopol

I just like to build. Don't get me wrong: I think stand-up is great, and when someone like Richard Pryor or Steve Martin does stand-up, there's nothing better in the world. But I don't want to watch a lot of stand-ups for two hours. So I can do 45 minutes of stand-up and then say, 'Can we do something else now?'

Noel Fielding

I'm an entertainer first. But I do as a stand up comedian, the way for me to evolve is to make a difference, to make people laugh and learn and do something different. Because there's too many comedians out there just making people laugh. And anybody can do that.

Ralphie May

One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that I'm a comedian, which I'm not. A comedian is someone who can stand up in front of an audience and make you laugh. I've never done stand-up and I never will. I'm a comic actor. My comedy comes through my characters.

Eugene Levy

There I go being critical again. Does a man have to stand on one foot and juggle for me to consider him entertaining? What am I looking for? A knight?...No, knights are all polished and shiny. I think my taste runs to something with a bit of tarnish and maybe a few scratches. Someone who can make me laugh and cry and make me angry and make my knees tremble when he touches me.

Nora Roberts

If you're gonna tell a story from beginning to end, I always think you have to have a great structure in a script. If it gets you excited and it's something you've never read before that's another plus. I think also with improv and that whole world of stand-up, that's a whole other organism of comedy that still needs a story, but it's more free-form. On the set, it is the combination of both those worlds coming together: a great script and an allowance to play with it.

Sandra Bullock

I don't think my comedy is that political. It's more social. But whatever. When you make comedy and you do stand-up, you work alone. Movies have to go under so much scrutiny. A stand-up special is a vision, and a movie is a consensus in a lot of ways.

Chris Rock

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.

Wislawa Szymborska

There's something wrong with the system when you've got someone who can provide so much to a company and can be enthusiastic, but isn't management material or whatever. So a lot of that just gets defined as the person who speaks with the loudest voice and gets up there with the most arrogance and overly confident, chest-beating approach. Those are the ones that are going to get the golden ring.

Milo Aukerman

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

Michael Ondaatje

We’ve been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all, to prefer fitting in with the right people, the people with economic power. Now it’s your turn to stand up and stand out.

Seth Godin

Probably the biggest temptation that young writers face is to be entertaining, to show your bag of tricks and do a bit of tap dancing. I read a lot of things, and I keep seeing this brocade of voice where someone is trying to be too pally with you or ingratiating on the page.

Teju Cole

At the beggining of my career, for me the comedy circuit was a combination of desperation and the fact that it was something I could do. I sort of meandered and really had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I had a go at stand-up, and I was sort of okay at it. I'd say I'm the opposite of someone that has the urge to stand in front of strangers and make them laugh, but the idea of getting up and telling a story and people finding it amusing always appealed to me. So I'd say it was probably more about that than anything.

Eric Bana

There are many different types of people that end up coming to me and saying 'Yeah I want to cook.' Some of them successful, some not. There's no one formula, but if I get someone coming through the backdoor who knows that they want to get into the cooking field, they feel this inside-out love for it, this attraction to it, that person is an awful lot easier to work with.