Zach Woods Quotes

Nobody's interested in sweetness and light.

The people of England are never so happy as when you tell them they are ruined.

I would say most comedians have a very cynical worldview of the way the world can work. It's almost like if you didn't, you couldn't be a comedian.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

I lean towards traditionally what people would consider the more negative side of life.

I detest jokes - when somebody tells me one, I feel my IQ dropping; the brain cells start to disappear. But something is funny when the person delivering the line doesn't know it's funny or doesn't treat it as a joke. Maybe it comes from a place of truth, or it's a sort of rage against society.

Even the news, to me, or newspapers, I have a hard time getting into it because it all sucks you into this negative, bad, there-is-no-hope side of it.

Not enough comedy makes you feel something.

All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the bread line - right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

I'm a cynical person who's normally attracted to the dark side of things.

Our line of work is very cynical, and a lot of it is driven by cynicism, cruelty, and meanness. It's easier to believe the negative stuff than the positive stuff. The feel-good stories don't usually spend a lot of time on the front pages.

Sometimes comedy can be, like, negative and just the worst parts of ourselves coming out.

I don't like to sing things that just sound like they're going straight down the tubes, and they're circling the drain, and there's no hope. It doesn't feel good in any way to sing.

In the current climate, we live in a pessimistic and non-idealistic world.

The older books were quite light-hearted. But I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn't that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.

Conventional show-biz savvy held that Americans hated to be the objects of satire.

Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

Nihilism in American comedy came along way before 'The Simpsons.' There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to 'Saturday Night Live,' for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.

I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come and seek me out, we'd talk about the future. And I found that their depression and pessimism was every bit as acute as mine.