A Quote by Jules Feiffer

I've had enormous luck and enormous pleasure in working in such forms as movies and plays that I loved when I was a kid and I just - because I could always write dialogue, because I always had a sense of how people spoke. And because I had a strong narrative sense; growing up and loving stories, loving novels, I just seem to know how to tell a story and I read a lot, I went to a lot of movies, I went to a lot of plays, and it rubbed off on me. And that's all. It just rubbed off on me.
I didn't watch a lot of American television growing up. I just liked to read a lot and watch movies - movies, movies, and more movies. My family used to make fun of me because I'd like every movie I saw.
We'd had books in my house growing up, but we had never had anything like lectures. I had never written an essay for my mother. I had never taken an exam. Because I was working a lot as a kid, I just hadn't elected to read that much.
As a kid, I was a big reader. Books and theater were the way I understood the world, and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life. I would read all night. My mom would come into my room and tell me I had to go to sleep, so I would hide books under my bed. At first I had a tough time getting through novels, so I read plays, because a play is generally shorter and has all those tools for getting people hooked early on.
The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.
It's always tricky to watch yourself, always. When I first had to watch myself, it was really hard because I'd done quite a few plays and I've never seen myself. So I was professional but I'd never watched myself. So I was like hearing you know... I'm sure you guys are all much more familiar with that because everybody has a phone, and everyone's taking pictures of themselves and making movies of themselves. And so people are more accustomed to it now. So I had to get used to it because there's a lot to be learned, of course, as an actor. When you watch yourself, you learn a lot.
I grew up loving monsters. I'm just a total monster geek. When I was a kid, I had the Aurora monster models, and I would make them. I loved the Universal horror movies and the Hammer movies. I just had an affinity for them.
I've always loved movies but everyone loves movies, so I never conceived of the fact that I could actually be in them. In high school I had some friends in the drama department, but they were just doing plays, and I was like, "Eh, I don't really think that that's me." So I just played sports. Then, a bunch of years later, I'm acting.
I'm not good looking. I'm very strange - a very bony face on an enormous skull, and I don't like to be naked because I don't like how I look naked. And - no, no. I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything. So I could have a lot more trappings of wealth if every time I had 20 extra dollars I didn't pay off more of the mortgage.
As a child I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me - also because I read a lot.
I always knew I wanted to be a character in the movies. When I was growing up, I had to have a lot of surgery, and I spent a lot of time recovering at home and in the hospital. Watching movies took me away from my own problems and gave me a total escape.
I'd prefer if people had no impressions of me. As a kid, I had to tell my own family, "Please, just don't talk about me!" Because they always got it wrong. Always. I just didn't want them to tell anyone anything about me.
The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.
I used to be a lot more engaged on an improvisational level than other people. I was always on tour and always had a guitar in my hands, and when I went back home, my battery was at full charge. I had a lot of energy to get off, just impulses that I could draw upon.
I've always loved movies since I was a kid. I loved how they could make me happy, sad, or just show me different parts of the world and people. So when I was about six, I decided that that was what I wanted to do: make movies.
Writing New People I was thinking a lot about the era that I came of age - the 90's. Brooklyn, in particular, this moment when I lived there. The sense of possibility. I was also trying to find a way to write about Jonestown. I had read about it a lot and I had the sense that the story could really start to drive one over the edge.
Ive always loved movies since I was a kid. I loved how they could make me happy, sad, or just show me different parts of the world and people. So when I was about six, I decided that that was what I wanted to do: make movies.
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