Kayvan Novak Quotes

Coming up with comedy is hard, man. Those bits aren't easy to think of!

The first thing you start with when you're trying to write something funny is it has to - it really has to come to you first. I has to be an idea that you have that first makes you laugh, that strikes you as funny.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

I'll think of the idea and then I'll write something down, then within that there will be a joke or two which is the original thing which I thought was funny.

You can't be funny if you don't have good material.

When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

Writing is very difficult. You have 120 pages of blank paper and it's like, "Go fill that up with some funny stuff," and that's challenging.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

Titles either come to you at the beginning or they don't come to you at all, I find, and I hate the feeling that I haven't got a title because it usually means that you are left at the end scrambling around trying to find something.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

Bouncing ideas off people when you're thinking up comedy is great.

In terms of the creative side of it, it's really been a thing where you come up with the funny stuff is usually at a bar or out talking to people or whatever.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

We sit in a room for months trying to think of funny things.

You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job.

And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun.

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

I really kill myself on titles, although 'The 5th Wave' seems like an obvious title, doesn't it? You don't know how long that took me.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

Comedians kind of write what comes to them. You can give yourself little assignments, but it's what inspires you.

When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.

With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.