Mark Billingham Quotes

I do feel it's important to entertain people. I try to.

Your only guidepost is your own instinct and judicious editing. In my stand-up act I learned that in the first 10 minutes I could say anything and it would get a laugh. Then I'd better deliver. In the movie it's the same thing. You get a lot of laughs when people first sit down and then the story better kick in. Many years in front of an audience, I would hope, give me a sense of what works.

These actors like Danny McBride and Jonah Hill are so good at improvising, and when they do it, it's this fun moment for the audience. It makes them feel like they're watching something fresh and new.

I want to entertain.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

A joke is a way to say, 'I'm going to do something funny now. If I don't get a laugh at the end, I'm a failure.'

What I've always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous.

One of the things that makes any good entertainment, whether it's a play, drama, comedy, television, film, whatever, is that you feel a certain amount of spontaneity.

I'm motivated by entertaining people.

You have to keep surprising your audience.

With Twitter, you just want to make people laugh in their meeting; on stage, people have paid for their tickets with their hard-earned money, so I owe them the truth as I experience it.

The success of any stand-up act comes out of life experience.

You'd better have something good to say if you've got a roomful of people who've paid to see you.

I enjoy stand up so much because I take time off, and then I'll be excited to go back to it.

I think working for the audience, for me, is the most fun. It's really a chance for something to work towards. It's where everything kind of comes together, and you have to make it work. You have all these people who are sitting there, wanting to have a good time and wanting to laugh. You really have no choice but to pull it out.

I do try to entertain.

I think my goal has always been to remain entertaining. Above all else, remain entertaining.

I enjoy both TV writing and novel writing, and they are very similar. The goal is to entertain and amuse the audience, and I subscribe to this P.G. Wodehouse piece of advice: "Try to give pleasure with every sentence."

In my stand-up, I generally improvise from an outline.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

I like giving people something they don't want to miss the next time. It's a show with little twists and turns and curves. It has me being silly and stupid and compassionate and completely deep.

If work isn't rooted in comedy, people will turn from it, or they'll use it like soap opera.

The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.

To be a comedian, you gotta jokesmith, there's no way around it.

I just want to keep people entertained.