Quote collection
339 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a vibrancy to it 50 years from now."
"I loved doing 'Pennies from Heaven.' Because you have to understand that I'd been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don't think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it."
"I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another."
"After one of my plays came out, I had mixed reviews, some bad and some good. One day, it dawned on me. I thought, 'I wrote a play and he wrote a review, and that's the difference between him and me.'"
"I find animated movies very touching. They reach an audience that's hard to get with a live-action film."
"So much emotion can be brought in an animated film that's very hard to get in a live-action film. I haven't quite put my finger on why, but it might be because the characters can make facial expression that, if you made them in a movie, they'd call them corny."
"Writing is something I took up rather than anything I had an inclination toward. I like acting -delivering someone else's message - but writing is more of an accomplishment."
"At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state."
"When I first started doing my stand-up act, I played the banjo, did comedy, magic tricks, juggled, read poetry. I stuck it all in. I didn't know you were supposed to just stand up and tell jokes. Essentially, that's what my act became: those five elements - except I dropped the poetry."
"The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year."
"Were they beautiful? We were all beautiful. We were in our twenties."
"The operation was a success, but I'm afraid the doctor is dead."
"The overhead lights reflect in the glass countertop and mingle in the gray and black of the gloves, resulting in a mother-of-pearl swirl that sometimes sends Mirabelle into a shallow hypnotic dream."
"I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian."
"I wish I could do a lot of things different. I'm not going to tell you what they are, but if I had a list of all my films right now, I'd go, 'Okay, I'll cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out.' Really. But I've made over 40 films. How can I not have some losers in there?"
"I don't watch myself generally. I do something, see it once, and then I'll probably never see it again unless it's an accident."
"I've heard lots of people lie to themselves but they never fool anyone."
"College totally changed my life. It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy."
"I actually learned about sex watching neighborhood dogs. And it was good. Go ahead and laugh. I think the most important thing I learned was: Never let go of the girl's leg, no matter how hard she tries to shake you off."