A Quote by Mason Cooley

In comedy, the witty style wins out over every mishap of the plot.

Mason Cooley

Quote Topics

Comedy Every Out Over Plot Style Wins Witty

Quote Author

Mason Cooley
American - Writer
1927 - 2002

I didn't want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can't just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.

Patricia Richardson

Comfort? If a choice has to be made between style and comfort, style wins every time.

Anouska Hempel

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

Chuck Palahniuk

I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.

Clive Cussler

When women live rich, in every sense of the word - financially, emotionally, physically, and spiritually - everyone wins: you win, your family wins, your community wins, and the world wins.

Marie Forleo

The grand style arises when beauty wins a victory over the monstrous.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.

Howard Hawks

I don't think I'm a witty person. To me, a witty person is a funny person who is also a smart person. My friend David Rakoff, who died a few years ago, he was a witty person. Fran Lebowitz is a witty person. I don't think there are that many witty people around, so you tend to notice them when they do come around. I don't consider myself to be that.

David Sedaris

You know, I think British comedy is very smart comedy. You don't get too much dumb comedy over here. Or at least I haven't seen it. If I'm wrong about that, I apologize to all the dumb comedy makers over here.

Matt LeBlanc

I can do comedy but it's a certain type. I'm not a physical comedy guy. I'm not Will Ferrell - there's just this crazy and get naked and run through the thing screaming. That's just not my style; my style is drama or - I'm not slapstick.

Mekhi Phifer

I don't like the bullying, do-one-over style of comedy. It's so cheap.

Olivia Colman

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

Don DeLillo

I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.

David Mitchell

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

Francine Prose

Now, where does my comedy come from, like, as a human being? Yeah, when I was a kid I was dyslexic and had to go to special-ed every day and felt stupid about that and got very witty to defend myself.