In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

There is scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not related, few which in some sense it has not governed. ... It is a lawless element, full of surprises.

In a sense the whole American comic tradition had been that of social criticism.

humor bears the closest relation to emotion, either bubbling up as from a deep and happy wellspring, or in an opposite fashion rising like a re-birth of feeling from dead levels after turmoil.

Whole phases of comedy have become empty; the comic rejoinder has become every man's tool.

For ruining a fact, do not attack it, defend it badly.

I'm not, like, Daniel Day Lewis. Yet. I will get there!

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

As a writer, the worst thing you can do is work in an environment of fear of rejection.

That a strong stimulus to such an afferent nerve, exciting most or all of its fibres, should in regard to a given muscle develop inhibition and excitation concurrently is not surprising.

Rules are invented for lazy people who don't want to think for themselves.

I was wearing women's jeans way before it was cool for guys to wear them. I have a weird torso - it's incredibly short, and only girl-pants fit me properly.

People are so used to having their lives filmed, they're not even conscious of having cameras around. I still have that sort of suspicion when a camera comes out. I view it as a thing to fear.

Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.