Quote

Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it's one place you can process them.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

I don't really find things funny unless they're deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you're funny just for the sake of being funny, it's just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.

There is nothing that is so serious that you can't also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

For every story you hear that's tragic, there's another that's equally tragic or more so. I think you come to look at it as part of life.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.