Tone Shift Quotes

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

Transforming a line like that makes it into a belly laugh instead of a laugh against us.

The clean clear colours were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try - all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show, 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting.

...it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.

'Joker' was a violent, dark, and brutal book, so I wanted to do something a little less heavy. I played around with the idea of a children's book, and that eventually became 'Noel.' And I just kept finding these parallels between things I could do with Batman and Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol.'

When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there.

I look for every opportunity to mix comedy and horror and tragedy. I love catching audiences off-guard.

It's basically the same, just darker.

It was a weird reaction to 'Batman Returns,' because half the people thought it was lighter than the first one, and half the people thought it was darker. I think the studio just thought it was too weird - they wanted to go with something more child- or family-friendly. In other words, they didn't want me to do another one.

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

I love taking something that is understood to be funny or charming or sweet or naive and instilling it with some degree of gravity.

You have a dramatic portion of your television program and you treat it dramatically, and then you have a comedic portion of your program, and you treat it differently. Why do you change who are between the two pieces? You're the same person. Just go.

To go from Girl, Interrupted, where I had to cry every day, to a TV show like West Wing where I get to laugh and joke around every day, has been a welcome relief.

Happy who in his verse can gently steer, From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.

It's always exciting to explore adult roles when the vast majority of viewers that have seen me on TV know me from 'Glee,' from something of a different tone.

I think 'Lost in Space' certainly shifted from being an ensemble adventure series about a family facing the unknown alien environment to this trio of comedians - Dr. Smith, the Robot, and Will Robinson being the straight guy. It definitely changed its tone over the three seasons and 84 episodes we did.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In 'The Colour of Magic' most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.'