Lauren Willig Quotes

I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill.

In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.

I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it: we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennett has to overcome, what she has to deal with.

Comedy isn't just timing; it's about rooting out the funny in the real. You just bend reality to the left a little.

I'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.

I've always tended to write comedy, but I'd hate to just write some kind of sitcom or a lighthearted series of jokes and slapstick. I wanted to talk about some deeper things within the comedy.

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

Most comics point out what everyone else is thinking but hadn't thought of verbalizing. I guess, in a way, that makes most comics seers. It just depends in what category - some choose to be the seers of relationships, some are seers of racial issues, and some are seers of political issues.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

I've always loved Jane Austen's writing.

Mike Judge is my Jonathan Swift, and I say that because I don't know any other satirists. But the problem with satire is that it's so easily misinterpreted.

Different things made 'Cheers' and 'Frasier' special. Both of them, though, were honest. It was the old Shakespeare thing: Hold the mirror up to life.

In my comedy, I'm not always trying to say something, but when I'm playing a creepy dude, you're laughing because you know that creepy dude. You've heard that dude say something awful, and I'm just putting a little creative spin on it.

I can always go back to Jane Austen. 'Mansfield Park' is full of wise aphorisms and relevant observations of people.

I see the absurdity in things, and I think it's my job to point it out.

Very few people took sordid things and made comedies out of them.

If written with enough care and thoughtfulness, a joke can make you laugh at a belief you hold dear.

Comedy can be very deep sometimes.