“There's always a moment in any stand-up show I do where people are booing. They kinda boo a premise. And then I bail myself out with a joke. But it's like trying to do movies where there's a dramatic undertone.”
Quote collection
People Quotes — page 817 of 5018
“When you make comedy, you make it for the people and you try to have as many screenings and as many tests and you do focus groups and you read the cards and you try to give the people what they want in this comedy.”
“I think all the funny people were bullied. When they talk about outlawing bullying, it's like, what? You want no Comedy Central?”
“When people try to read between the lines - critics, they have a job. Their job is to make something bigger than it is.”
“I see as white people finding loopholes in the slavery laws.”
“People have maybe, sometimes, said that I can, occasionally, be a teeny bit edgy and judgmental.”
“To me, trying to achieve the balance is when you become good: when you have enough technique to be able to play what is that you want, but also when you can refine what you want to communicate to people. As a younger person, it wasn't something I thought about so much.”
“I was a really good youth boxer, and I enjoyed the sport very much. Once I actually started to play the trumpet, it is very similar to boxing. Most of the great trumpet players boxed: Miles Davis was a boxer, Wallace Roney is a boxer, Terrence Blanchard is a boxer. In a boxing ring, no one can help you. It's just you and the other guy, and your job is to get him out of there, to outscore him in the best sense of it. When you learn to box, the first thing they teach you is to protect yourself at all times, and some people also learn that they like being hit.”
“People call what we do "stretch music." This is our style, and one of the newer, in vogue ways of playing creative, improvised music. It really grew out of me trying to address something that I saw in my everyday life in my neighborhood - trying to develop that and refine that and excavate exactly what that was in a way that, when I communicated it, it was palpable and easily read. That started really early. Why it started was from something that I was really angry about.”
“Forgiveness is the act of admitting we are like other people.”
“Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'”
“The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity”
“Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.”
“There are many, many discrepant views within the Shia theology about what's the proper role of religion in society or in the State, should it rule now, should it claim to govern people in the here and now, or should it wait until the Messiah, the 12th Imam, comes back and would it only be then appropriate for religious rule to bring about a world of universal justice and vindication.”
“For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.”
“I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.”
“(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.”
“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.”
“Plainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell's matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one's own weaknesses instead of those of other people.”
“If people I've never met or don't know say that what I've written or done or said means anything to them, then I'm happy to take it at face value, for once. It cheers me up.”