Rachel Joyce Quotes

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

It's just something that's sort of funny, sort of not.

Be obscure clearly.

I think what human beings need is to be able to laugh at the absurd, hold on to ambiguity, and learn to love nuance, instead of making everything one or the other, and structurally, so much of the Internet and online publishing doesn't have room for any of that.

I like to ride the line between absurd and sincere.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

It's a funny old world.

I like to think my sense of humor is sort of smart and dumb at the same time. I like to work on multiple levels - smart and dumb, funny and sad, profound and mundane, cynical and hopeful.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

The reverse side also has a reverse side.

Terrible saloons might be, but they may be terribly wonderful.

Just because a subject is serious doesn't mean it doesn't have plenty of absurdities.

I've always thought the word cow was funny. And cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.

I'm a walking contradiction. I am funny that way.