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There's nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking; pessimism is detail-oriented thinking.

There's probably a little greater case for pessimism than optimism. But I do not rule out optimism.

Comedy is acting out optimism.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget, but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

Sometimes pessimism or optimism gets popular, and it's contagious.

Even in a gleefully negative comic, there is optimism, although it's slightly hidden: It comes out through a comic character's sheer tenacity. He keeps going and trying to find some sort of fulfillment regardless of his perpetual failure record. That's a form of hope, a form of optimism. Really hokey I know, but it's true.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says, 'Don't worry - everything will be just fine,' and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.