A Quote by Mark Strand

It's very hard to write humor.

Mark Strand

Quote Topics

Humor Hard Very Write

Quote Author

Mark Strand
American - Poet
April 11, 1934 - November 29, 2014

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it or you don't. You can't attain it. There are terrible forms of professional humor, the humorists' humor. That can be awful. It depresses me because it is artificial. You can't always be humorous, but a professional humorist must. That is a sad phenomenon.

Heinrich Böll

Humor is hard, hard, hard. And if you fail with humor, you don't fail halfway. You drop the ball humor-wise and everyone notices.

Patrick Rothfuss

It's very slow for me to create humor. It takes me a long time to write a humor piece. It takes days.

Dave Barry

Tone is a very difficult thing. You can't write tone, I don't think. You can try - you certainly try. I write too, so I know I'm trying desperately to communicate to whoever's going to direct my pieces, the way I see the humor. But it's very difficult.

Beth Grant

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it, or you don't. You can't attain it.

Heinrich Boll

Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one.

Anton Chekhov

With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.

Dave Barry

Comedy is so hard to do, so it was very cool to do dead pan humor.

Brittany Daniel

When I'm with other people who inspire my silliness or sense of humor, I'm funny. When I sit down to write, it's hard not to be funny.

James Howe

There's a difference between someone who's 'harsh' and someone who is 'hard.' Life was hard. You lived in the South, as my grandparents did, and you had to survive. That is hard. In order to respond to that, he had to become a hard man, with very hard rules, very hard discipline for himself, very hard days, hard work, et cetera.

Clarence Thomas

It would be very hard to write a serious drama and say some of these things. You can be much more abstract and allusive with horror, and it's very forgiving to the author. You don't necessarily have to take an absolutely positive position. You can just write whatever.

George A. Romero

When you're being looked at very hard, it's very hard to look back. And that made me stop paying attention to the world in a way that allowed me then to write about it.

Andrew Motion

Criticism is hard for me but people find hard to believe because they think I'm very tough, very strident, that I tell everybody where to get off, and how. But I've actually got a really thin skin. I don't know. It's quite pathetic. So, yeah, it's hard for me to take criticism. But I also kind of have this sense of humor on overdrive, so I don't take any of it seriously. So that sort of saves me, the fact that I think it's just all kind of funny.

Ani DiFranco

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

Mike Rutherford

It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not.