Top 1200 Writing Humor Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

Since the goal of my programs is to show audiences how humor can both help them heal as well as deal with not-so-funny stuff, I decided to discuss the events of the previous week, the pain all of us were feeling, and how humor and some laughter might be beneficial.

When I did stand-up at U.C.B., and I had a blog for a couple of years that started my writing career, 'Totally Confident and Completely Insecure,' it was the same kind of self-deprecating humor and stories about being out in L.A. and being treated like a loser at a hair salon because you are not famous.

The one thing I didn't expect was to learn how much of a sense of humor Jerry Reinsdorf has. He's really funny. I never got a chance to see his sense of humor when I was working for him or playing for him.

I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things; it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff, just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.

Humor is the balance of the tonal. Within the tonal you've got reason and humor. The two balance each other so that the tonal can accept and understand the journeys into the nagual.

I just play to progressive audiences. You know, if they're watching Discovery Channel, History Channel, that kind of thing, "Monty Python" have already laid the groundwork. They're known around the world. People like that kind of surrealist, left-field humor, and that's what I do. And "Saturday Night Live," a lot of American humor. "The Simpsons," above all, the weird, left-field humor, which I love. And sardonic. So that's all I'm doing. I find that audience, and they're in every developed country around the world.

It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.

A big part of the humor is in identifying with the tragic elements of the film. The New Zealand sense of humor is very dark. Our films are usually very dark and it's always someone being killed. Usually a child.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

I'm a big fan of gallows humor. When my aunt passed away, she was in a coma for a day before my cousins pulled the plug. And the amount of joking and base humor that went on that day around her bed was so insane. It's crazy how people talk when something horrible is happening.

Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's.

I've inherited a Jewish sensibility and sense of humor from my parents and all those who came before me. All the Jewish comedians, character actors and writers I was exposed to also reminded me of my family in their sense of humor.

Humor is not the opposite of seriousness. Humor is the opposite of despair.

I certainly didn't have New York Jewish humor. But I was in three Mel Brooks films so people thought I was a connoisseur of New York Jewish humor.

When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment.

Sometimes when I try to make jokes or have a sense of humor in interviews, it doesn't go over very well. But Twitter made my life easier in this way that I didn't expect. It would have taken probably 10 times as long for people to accept my voice and my sense of humor if I didn't have Twitter.

If you are making money writing, you are doing great. If you can support yourself writing, you are a success. I don't care if you're writing textbooks or Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for weighty publications of world renown: If you're writing and it's paying the bills, consider yourself a successful writer.

Also, my humor is really dry-witted, Canadian humor, so some people get it and some people don't. I'd be great on "The Office." I would like to be on that show. And, I could see me doing romantic comedy films, and stuff like that.

I was a heathen Jewess with no bat mitzvah. Only the neurosis, the brown hair, and the self-deprecating humor. But being one of the only Jewish kids in my WASPy hometown definitely informed my perspective on the humor of being an outsider.

From the opening lines, Sleeping with Schubert is a hilarious, whimsical romp through the looking glass of a great musical mystery. The writing snaps, crackles, and pops with humor as Bonnie Marson makes Schubert a sexy, happening kind of guy who gives new meaning to our dreaming the impossible.

Senses of humor define people, as factions, deeper rooted than religious or political opinions. When carrying out everyday tasks, opinions are rather easy to set aside, but those whom a person shares a sense of humor with are his closest friends. They are always there to make the biggest influence.

A lot of people say, 'Hey, God doesn't have a sense of humor.' Yes, He does. God has a great sense of humor.

I do think reading is the best practice for writing, along with writing all the time. I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.

Humor disarms people. It opens them up to starting a dialogue about things they wouldn't normally talk about. I don't understand how people who don't have a sense of humor get through life.

I find that I'm extremely unattracted to anything that's humorless. There is writing that is entirely serious, and it doesn't ring true to me, because I think, oftentimes, life is very, very funny. Even the worst, most humiliating, savage disappointments in retrospect have elements of bleak humor.

I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry.

Zen is non-serious. Zen has a tremendous sense of humor. No other religion has evolved so much that it can have that sense of humor.

I tell the truth and I don't try to sugarcoat things. But I also decided that if you don't use humor or satire, then it's just too dark all the time. And one of my favorite literary works is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. As you know, that was an enormously famous satire piece that was able to point out, you know, things to people in a different way. And I do believe that satire and humor can reveal truth in a way that sometimes doesn't get revealed through other means. And so I decided to, every now and then, use satire and humor as well.

When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do.

When people, especially from France, would ask me to talk about or so they could write about New York Jewish humor, I'd say I don't know anything about New York Jewish humor. I know who Zero Mostel was and I know Mel Brooks, but that's about all I could tell you about New York Jewish humor.

Humor can make a serious difference. In the workplace, at home, in all areas of life - looking for a reason to laugh is necessary. A sense of humor helps us to get through the dull times, cope with the difficult times, enjoy the good times and manage the scary times.

I think that sense of humor is important in marriage. A sense of humor gets people through marriage.

You honor your writing space by recovering, if you are an addict. You honor your writing space by becoming an anxiety expert, a real pro at mindfulness and personal calming. You honor your writing space by affirming that you matter, that your writing life matters, and that your current writing project matters. You honor your writing space by entering it with this mantra: “I am ready to work.” You enter, grow quiet, and vanish into your writing.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind - -vividly, forcefully.

Humor is a marvelous communications tool, as Reagan has demonstrated so well. He has weathered many a storm that others might not have. With Reagan, people just say, 'There he goes again.' A sense of humor allows a president to back off a little from the tensions of the moment and take a calmer view of things.

Humor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.

My dad has a very dry sense of humor and my mom has a more fun, silly sense of humor. My mom is the type that, at the dinner table, you'd look over at and she'd have a piece of asparagus hanging down her nose. Classic mom bit.

Conservative humor is frankly harder than liberal humor. You get points for just being liberal. You can get more points if you make fun of your own side sometimes.

I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I'm lazier than most. [...] The other problem I have is fear of writing. The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing. [...] Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. [...] It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work.

On the craft level, writing for children is not so different from writing for adults. You still have to have a story that moves forward. You still have to have the tools of the trade down. The difference arises in the knowledge of who you're writing for. This isn't necessary true of writing for adults.

I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.

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

I don't like to have these words banded about, like "British sense of humor," "American sense of humor," though I'll be damned if I know what they are.

Keeping a sense of humor about life. My parents divorced when I was 8, and whenever I felt down, my mom would remind me that a sense of humor gets you through just about anything.

From the very beginning, I started doing music performances with a lot of theatrical aspects to them, where humor was a part of it but not necessarily had to be. Humor is just another tool to make the palette more rich and interesting for myself and eventually for the public. It's a great way to break out of convention.

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

We’ve got to have a little humor in our lives. You had better take seriously that which should be taken seriously but, at the same time, we can bring in a touch of humor now and again. If the time ever comes when we can’t smile at ourselves, it will be a sad time.

If one tends to be a humorous person and you have a sense of humor the rest of your life then you can certainly lighten the load, I think, by bringing that to your trials and tribulations. It's easy to have a sense of humor when everything is going well.

I think the thrust of any child is to try to fit in and be part of it. And I can't tell you how many times my humor, you know, what I thought was humor ended up making me the outsider. Like I'd be, I go, 'It's a joke.' And they'd go, 'Well, what was funny?' And they just thought I was insane.

Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.

Humor is always important. There are people who help us deal with difficulty or hardship; from the concentration camps to the court jester, there was a need for humor. As long as these kinds of things exist, with repressive regimes, you need it to deal with the weight of daily life.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

In the eighties, there was a huge shift in the humor of Japanese television. Up until then, the humor was garnered by people who said humorous things, but in the '80s, it was garnered by people who were being laughed at while the audience watches and watches.

. . .a sense of humor can be a great help-particularly a sense of humor about (oneself). William Howard Taft joked about his own corpulence and people loved it; took nothing from his inherent dignity. Lincoln eased tense moments with bawdy stories, and often poked fun at himself-and history honors him for this human quality. A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor.

Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly. And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.

I'm really interested in the link between creativity and humor because humor is a type of creativity, and I do think that humorous people and humorous health helps creativity.

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.