Category: Comedy Books

I recently finished a great comedy book, “And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft” by Mike Sacks. I got a ton of useful quotes from it, so this will be a rather long series of posts. I recommend buying the whole book, as there is a lot of insight inside. Since the book is interview style based, I’ve put the writer’s name above all of the quotes that are attributed to him.

BUCK HENRY

“I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening.” (6)

“If you ride in limos for too long, you tend to forget what cabs, buses, and subways are like. You lose contact. I think it’s important to stay in contact with the outside world.” (6)

“All the great filmmakers from the past knew something about real life.” (13)

“One of the characters says, “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV.” That’s an American disease. And it’ sonly become truer now than it was when the movie came out.” (13)

“When you’ve been in improvisational theater, you get used to capturing the characteristics of people who are really out there in the world. And if you’re up on stage every night for a year, or two years, or three years, with the audience yelling suggestions at you like “Do Chekhov, but do it with Chinese characters,” you get used to an immediate commitment to lunatic ideas. You gain a confidence. Most of the SNL cast members came from that background.” (16)

“In one of the samurai sketches, John hit me in the forehead with a samurai sword. He put a real gash in it, and I needed a bandage. And by the end of the show, when the cast members were saying good-bye, all of them had bandages on their heads.” (17)

“Timing is when a movie comes out. Timing is what the country’s political disposition is when a movie is released. It’s what people are thinking about – what they want to see. You really can’t control that as a writer. But if you’re talented, it’ll all work out in the end. I mean, not all the talented writers will make it, of course… but for the most part, if you’re talented, I think somebody will find you.” (17)

STEPHEN MERCHANT

“In a documentary, there’s no real narrative. Usually in a documentary, a narrative I just created unofficially.” (20)

“There’s nothing wrong with a huge audience. But in reaching for that huge audience, you could possibly compromise your material or maybe try to second-guess what an audience wants. We genuinely thought that The Office was funny and that it was truthful, and maybe there would be a million and a half like-minded people who thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. And if that happened, then we’d think, oh, well, we had fun and that was good. And that would be that.” (21)

“When we first showed The Office to test audiences in Britain, we received one of the lowest scores ever – the only show that beat ours was one that featured women’s lawn bowling. That’s why you can’t judge these focus groups.” (22)

“The best sitcoms are about creating an environment in which you want to return and poke around for another half-hour.” (22)

“The most important things in life are to find a job you like, to make a difference, and to find someone you love.” (25)

“Initially we started off trying to improvise, and then we typed the dialogue, but that was a very slow way of working. Ultimately, we bought a Dictaphone tape recorder. We would improvise into it and sort of refine the dialogue a little, and then we would edit it down later so that it could be typed up. It just seemed the only way to create that ebb and flow of real dialogue, where people stop and start and they don’t use proper grammar. Speech patterns are very different from what you would get if you were to just write dialogue.” (25)

“I think we kind of liked that the audience was not entirely sure how they should feel.” (29)

“We never sit down and think about what subjects we are going – or are not going – to tackle. We just do what feels right. Audiences see certain topics, and their immediate reaction is anxiety. You can’t talk about this, you can’t joke about that. Our feeling is that the more we accept people who may be different, the more we should be able to joke about our own discomfort. If I have friends who are disabled, I can make jokes about their disability, just like they can make jokes about my height or Ricky being overweight. Of course, if you’re meeting someone in the street for the first time, you don’t start making those cracks, because it’s inappropriate. But to us it’s that fascinating stew of discomfort and ignorance that becomes a great recipe for laughter. We’re not laughing at the disabled; we’re laughing at people’s discomfort with disability.” (30)

“We want our shows to be aimed at a sort of reasoning, smart, intelligent audience that can steer its way through ambiguities.” (31)

“There’s always a danger that we as comedy fans are writing comedy for other comedy fans. Whereas the average viewer – and I don’t mean this in a disparaging way – but the average viewer doesn’t sit around thinking about how jokes work. Its just not something that’s important to them. They just want the joke to be funny. So you can’t be too clever. You can’t assume reference points and sophistication that are not there.” (31)

“Sometimes you can get too up your own ass.” (31)

JUDD APATOW

“Whenever we got stuck, Garry Shandling always said, “What is the truth here? What would someone actually do?” He pushed his writers to go deeper to the core.” (33)

KEN LEVINE

“Before anything else, you have to learn how to write. And you learn writing by teaching yourself.” (34)

“One way to stand out is to write a holiday-themed script.” (35)

“Just make it “Jessica enters.” That’s all you need. Describe the action quickly, and get on with it. But you can sprinkle the scripts with inside jokes, such as: “Character orders a three-pound lobster (therefore breaking the show’s budget.) Small jokes that will reward the reader.” (35)

“When I go on staff, I want the producers and everyone else to think, Man, we cannot do the show without this guy.” (35)

HAROLD RAMIS

“An audience member told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.” I said to myself: Why wouldn’t you want o think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?” (37)

“The other end of the spectrum isn’t funny: “I get so much respect.” No one will laugh at how great things are for somebody.” (38)

“I was more intrigued by the alternative comedy posture. The characters I enjoyed creating were the dropouts and the rebels. They voluntarily opted out of the mainstream. It wasn’t because they couldn’t join it. It was because it wasn’t worth doing. Or there was some serious hypocrisy going on. Or it wasn’t cool.” (38)

“I worked in a mental institution in St. Louis, which prepared me well for when I went out to Hollywood to work with actors.” (39)

“Michael Shamberg said, “Comedy works in two ways. Either you have a normal person in an extraordinary situation or an extraordinary person in a normal situation.” And A Confederacy of Dunces was about an extraordinary person in a series of extraordinary situations.” (42)

“I’m always more offended by dishonesty and hypocrisy than by an honest portrayal of the real world.” (45)

“Often, Rodney Dangerfield thought he was bombing on the set, because no one was laughing. He just didn’t know from that world. He really knew nothing about the process of filmmaking.” (47)

“It’s the editing room that saves your ass. If you took all the improv from Caddyshack and did it onstage, you’d bomb half the time. One thing I learned to do was shoot enough improv so I could actually shape it in the editing room.” (47)

“If you’re cutting away on a joke, you’re probably doing it because you can’t top that joke. If the scene is still building and is still rich, you keep going.” (47-48)

“In any genre, viewers want to feel something. They want to have an experience. There are more well-made movies than good movies. That’s sort of my new mantra. Plenty of people can shoot beautiful films. There are a lot of great edits, a lot of great designers. But where is the content? Who are the characters? Is it moving? You want the audience to feel something, and if it’s comedy, you want them to laugh hard, even if it’s at the expense of a better shot or a better edit. There are many times when the editor will say to me, “Well, that’s not a real good cut.” And I’ll say, “Yeah, but it’s funny. Let’s just do it.” (48)

“I always tell students to identify the most talented person in the room, and if it isn’t you, go stand next to him.” (48)

“It’s like that great saying, “You ride the horse in the direction it’s going.” Billy goes his own way. But he’ll go my way if he thinks it’s a good way. So my job is not to force the actor to do anything; it’s to convince them. Billy was smart enough to know a good thing when he heard it. If I said, “Try this” or “try that,” and it was really funny, he’d do it.” (49)

Q: Do you have a target audience in mind when you write?
“No, I write for everybody. Or, really, for anyone who can read and is not hopelessly fucked in the head.” (50)

“I just did what I wanted to do and what interested me. As I tell writing students, the only thing you have that is unique is yourself.” (51)

“The other approach is to skip the pitch and just write it. You don’t want to waste a lot of time waiting for an editor to evaluate the pitch. Just write it – either the editor will laugh or not.” (53)

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2

I recently finished  “Comedy At The Edge: How stand-up in the 1970’s changed America” by Richard Zoglin.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it. Here’s some (okay A LOT) of quotes from it:

“New York City alone, as I write this, has nearly a dozen-compared with just three in their ‘70s heyday. But the sense of adventure has been replaced by the programmed predictability of a General Motors assembly plant. The comics all sound pretty much alike these days, with the same patter to loosen up the crowd.” (2)

“Stand-up comedians who reached their artistic maturity in the late’60s and ‘70s saw themselves as rebel artists. Unlike the comedians of an earlier generation.” (2)

“By their very presence onstage – alone in front of a mike, telling it like it is- they were advertisements for honesty and authenticity, a rebuke to the phoniness and self-righteousness of your parents’ generation.” (3)

“The old comics made jokes about real life. The new comics turned real life into the joke.” (5)

“Even at their peak of creativity and popularity, these stand-up innovators were often itchy to move on. They didn’t feel validated (or make enough money) until they proved themselves in other fields – movies, TV sitcoms, directing. Stand-up comedy may be the only major art form whose greatest practitioners, at any given time, want to be doing something else.” (5)

“Many of them had relatively short stand-up careers. Unlike rock stars, they couldn’t go on indefinitely with greatest-hits tours. The old jokes had to be constantly refreshed, and that became harder as they aged – as their material became familiar from TV and the cocoon of fame enveloped them, cutting them off from their real-life sources inspiration.” (5)

“The result was a brain drain that short-circuited the careers of many young comics, who came to regard stand-up not as an end In itself but as a road to sitcom stardom.” (6)

“”I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values,” Bruce once said.” (10)

“Lenny Bruce was incapable of separating the comedy from the comedian.” (13)

“Carlin was disciplined about his work, a compulsive student of his own career who kept a detailed log of every gig he did.” (19)

“Carlin said, “I think I was looking for familiar frames of reference that lend themselves to distortion. Because distortion is one of the most important things in comedy. You look at an ordinary event, an ordinary tableau, and you say, what element can I distort in this? And suddenly you have at least the potential for a joke.”” (25)

“Carlin showed that stand-up comedy could be a noble calling, one that required courage and commitment and that could have an impact outside of its own little world. And you could make a lifetime career of it, without burning out or self-destructing.” (40)

“Richard Pryor: “I wanted to do more black material, but I had people around me telling me to wait until I had really made it and then I could talk to the colored. I knew I had to get away from people who thought like that and the environment that made them think like that.”” (48)

“I was working very hard and wasn’t making great money but I loved it because I was doing the material I wanted to do,” Pryor said. “I learned what freedom is.” (50)

“The power of Pryor’s comedy had its drawbacks as well. Plenty of comedians, white and black, emulated his rough language and in-your-face style but missed the empathy and vulnerability that informed it.” (63)

““In stand-up, being ahead of the country is the same as being behind. All that matters is the right moment,” said David Steinberg.” (71)

“Robert Klein says, “I had an education. I was intelligent. I wanted to say something.” (77)

“If I was going to have a career on The Tonight Show,” Klein realized, “I couldn’t be talking past people.” (79)

““Klein wasn’t afraid of going over the audience’s head,” said Jerry Seinfeld.” (81)

“Like most people in show business, Budd Friedman’s interest in you was in exact proportion to how he could use you at the moment.” (89)

“Budd Friedman had his little principles: ‘You can never blame the audience. It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.’” (90)

“When Larry David went on, all the comics in the bar would rush in to see him,” says Albrecht, “and all the people in the audience would rush to the exits.” (105)

“Most comedians worry about being funny,” says Dennis Klein, a comedy writer who was friends with Albert Brooks for year. “Albert is the only one who doesn’t worry about that. He worries about everything else.” (110)

“What I thought was so amazing was that the audience knew Jack Benny’s persona so well that he didn’t do anything. All he had to do was react. Most comedians have to create the confusion. All he had to do was look at it. And that was such a profound, clear comedy character.” (116)

“As I studied the history of philosophy, the quest for ultimate truth became less important to me, and by the time I got to Wittgenstein, it seemed pointless,” Steve Martin told Time magazine. “Then I realized that in the arts, you don’t have to discover meaning; you create it.” (128)

“Says Martin, “I decided that to deny the audience the punch line was the secret of modern comedy. I sort of analyzed the one-liner, which was the style before I started working – OK, here’s the punch line, how funny do you think it is? And I thought, well, if there were no punch lines, it would create its own tension, and eventually the audience would start laughing and they won’t know why. And that’s a better kind of laugh.” (133)

Steve Martin: “I came up with a plan, which was to observe myself when I laughed, and figure out what it was that made me laugh, and try to put it into material. And the second biggest artistic and commercial decision I made was to drop the politics, to go very solipsistic. I just wanted to break from the depth of that political infestation in comedy. It was very pervasive. It was just making me another one of the group.” (133)

“The lesson for Martin: he needed to stop being an opening act and hold out for headline spots – even if it meant going to smaller clubs. “My opening act was going nowhere,” he says. “There’s a kind of psychological aspect to opening: even if you killed and you’re better than the headliner, they only remember the headliner.” (134)

“I think my material didn’t change so much as its delivery,” says Martin. “And the delivery was just that total confidence.” (134)

“When someone up front would leave to go to the bathroom, Martin would enlist the rest of the crowd in a practical joke: when the poor sap came back, Martin instructed them to laugh at everything he said even before the punch lines. Three thousand people playing a prank on one unsuspecting schlub. It was brilliant lunacy.” (135)

“When the crowd lingered, Martin led them outside, saw an empty swimming pool next door, and on an impulse, told everyone to climb inside, forming a human sea while he “swam” across their bodies.” (135)

“Says Lorne Michaels, “we were burned-out. He was sunshine. We were very much about being taken seriously. And Steve was braver than that. He didn’t care.” (136)

“I knew that while I was hot, I had better switch to something,” Martin says. “I had no intention of turning over my act and getting a new act. I knew it was over when it was over. And I thought, now’s the time. I’m hot enough to make a deal. You’re on a train and it’s going one way and another train passes and it’s going another way, you gotta leap onto that other train when your paths are crossing.” (139)

“Martin demonstrated that experimental comedy was not inconsistent with entertaining huge numbers of people.” (140)

“Once you got that Tonight Show break, you’d better be ready – with enough material to last more than one appearance.” (142)

“Seinfeld put off his Tonight Show debut for months while he gathered enough material to avoid the David Sayh trap.” (143)

“Then they open up that curtain, and at that moment you feel something nudging your Adam’s apple, and it’s your asshole trying to get out.” (143)

“Carson was so secure in himself that he never had a problem laughing his ass off when somebody was funny.” (145)

“What Leno demonstrated to me, by being on stage,” says Letterman, “was the importance of attitude.” (154)

“Leno was a glutton for the road, a comic who never met a crowd he didn’t want to win over. Letterman never liked performing outside of the comfortable cocoon of the Comedy Store.” (156)

“Kaufman, the conceptual comic whose big joke, most of the time, was that he didn’t have an ounce of talent in his body.” (160)

“My style in the beginning, especially in the smaller clubs, was not to be on the mike,” Kaufman recalls. “Because if you were on mike, you invited the standard thing where people could kind of lose track. So if I didn’t go on mike, they were immediately listening.” (162)

“Andy would always watch the audience,” says Zmuda. “The theatrical moment for him was not onstage, but what’s taking place in the crowd.” (174)

“Kaufman always felt inhibited by Taxi, and reduced the number of episodes he did in the later seasons. “He wanted to be on the cutting edge,” says Zmuda. “He felt all of TV was a sellout. We couldn’t tell the difference between Full House and Saturday Night Live.” (176)

“When Kaufman played Harrah’s in Reno, according to Zmuda, he paid a visit to the Mustang Ranch, the famed Nevada brothel, and vowed to sleep with all forty-two girls in the house before the end of his weeklong run. He accomplished the feat just under the wire, Zmuda says.” (177)

“An administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the comedians, as independent contractors, could not be unionized.” (200)

“Oh my God, the parties we had there,” says Rick Overton. “Inexplicable stains everywhere. Waitress who go, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ then when you’re looking for a condom, say, ‘It’s in the third drawer.’”

“Getting a TV sitcom, however, was a Faustian bargain for any stand-up comic who was serious about his art. On the one hand, it could make you famous beyond your wildest dreams. On the other, it neutralized your best talents by putting you at the services of formulaic scripts, ensemble casts, and network restrictions on language and content. You might get an ovation when you walked back into the Improv, but it wasn’t necessarily deserved. The skills of live stand-up needed constant maintenance; it wasn’t easy to pick up again after you stopped doing it regularly.” (213)

“The TV sitcom changed the dynamics of the stand-up profession. IT drew comedians from New York to Los Angeles faster than ever. It encouraged them to develop clean, family friendly routines that would be palatable to a mass TV audience. And it altered their career ambitions.” (215)

“They were the comics who got so good at their jobs that they could leave it behind – for movies or a TV series. In the ‘60s it would have been called selling out. In the ‘80s it simply meant that stand-up was losing much of its urgency and vitality, a sense that it was central to what was happening in the culture and the country.” (216)

“Any art works best when it’s the only pinhole of expression that a human being has,” Seinfeld says. “Everything that they want to express gets forced through that little hole.” (217)

Seinfeld: “Klein was a hipper guy, but he was talking to unhip people, and getting them to laugh. If I could sum up my entire philosophy of comedy in one sentence, it is to be hip without excluding. That’s the key: staying on the front of the curve, without leaving the mainstream audience behind.” (218)

“Seinfeld was known among his friends as the professor of comedy. He studied joks and worked diligently on new material. He made sure he spent at least an hour a day writing, compiling his ideas on a pad of yellow lined paper. “Jerry was the first one I saw who understood the importance of craft,” says Larry Miller. “He would write every day. I only started doing that about three years in.” “His life was always very efficient and clean and uncluttered,” says Resier. “He used to have a wallet that had one credit card and however many crisp bills he needed. And one piece of paper of one word ideas he wrote down that day. He’d try out that stuff. Jerry did new stuff regularly and methodically.” (219)

“I was at the top of the food chain in New York,” Seinfeld says. “I didn’t like everyone looking up to me. I figured that wasn’t good for my growth.” (221)

“Most of the great innovators of ‘70s stand-up, like avant-garde artists of many eras, faced the problem of watching their outsider art become part of the mainstream culture – rubbing them of their originality and their raison d’etre.” (222)

“Stand-up comedy in the ‘70s helped created the world we live in, and the way we look at it. It made us more cynical about our leaders, and more suspicious of authority of all kind. It forced us to take a close, skeptical look at the media world that has overwhelmed us. It made us more open about ourselves, and more willing to tolerate differences in others. It freed up our language and showed that our most embarrassing memories are nothing to be ashamed of, because others share them too. It made us observant and questioning and smart. It taught us not to sit still for anything, but to talk back.” (224)

I recently finished “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. I highly recommend this book, especially if you treat it as a workbook.

The two main activities this book preaches, which aren’t obvious from the quotes below are 1) Writing three pages of stream of consciousness every morning, and 2) Going on an “Artist’s Date” with yourself every week. I’ve been writing every morning since I started reading this book in November, and I’ve definitely noticed a huge surge in creative output. Not from writing the three pages every day per say, but from getting the momentum going of writing every day. That makes it easier to write later on in the day, as the hardest part of it is starting. The Artist’s Date is just taking 2 or 3 hours a week to do some fun, child like activity with yourself, as this will inspire more creativity. Anyway, here are some actual quotes:

“People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or the specifically imagined.” (82)

“Think of yourself as an accident victim walking away from the crash: your old life has crashed and burned; your new life isn’t apparent yet. You may feel yourself to be temporarily without a vehicle Just keep walking.” (83)

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” –Seneca (83)

“Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite – getting something down. The directions are important here.” (117)

“We are the instrument more than the author of our work.” (118)

“I remind my students that their movie already exists in its entirety. Their job is to listen for it, watch it with their mind’s eye, and write it down.” (118)

“Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.” (120)

“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough – that we should try again.”

“We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly.” (121)

“Very often a risk is worth taking simply for the sake of taking it.” (123)

“Most academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.” (132)

“Because I asked “How?” instead of “Why me?” I now have a modest first feature to my credit.” (136)

“I love movies, love making them, and did not want my losses to take me down. I learned, when hit by loss, to ask the right question: “What next?” instead of “Why me?” (136)

“Whenever I am willing to ask “What is necessary next?” I have moved ahead. Whenever I have taken no for a final answer I have stalled and gotten stuck. I have learned that the key to career resiliency is self-empowerment and choice.” (136)

“Clarke clearly took to hear the idea that it was harder to hit a moving target. Whenever one avenue for her creativity was blocked, she found another.” (137)

“Non illegitimi te carborundum, the graffiti in prisoner-of-war camps is said to have run. The rough translation, very important for artists, is “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” (137)

“Artists who take this to heart survive and often prevail. The key here is action. Pain that is not used profitably quickly solidifies into a leaden heart, which makes any action difficult.” (137)

“Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.” – Linus Pauling (138)

“Question: Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn how to play the piano?
Answer: The same age you will be if you don’t.” (138)

““I’m too old” is an evasive tactic. It is always used to avoid facing fear.” (138)

“Many blocked creatives tell themselves they are both too old and too young to allow themselves to pursue their dreams.” (138)

“We do not want to look crazy. And trying something like that (whatever it is) at our age (whatever it is) would look nuts.” (139)

“Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.” (139)

“Kids are not self-conscious, and once we are actually in the flow of our creativity, neither are we.” (139)

“Instead of allowing ourselves a creative journey, we focus on the length of the trip. “it’s such a long way,” we tell ourselves. It may be, but each day is just one more day with some motion in it, and that motion toward a goal is very enjoyable.” (139)

“You can’t learn to act because there is always more to learn.” (139)

“Doing the work points the way to new and better work to be done.” (139)

“Focused on process, our creative life retains a sense of adventure. Focused on product, the same creative life can feel foolish or barren.” (139)

“There is always one action you can take for your creativity daily.” (141)

“By setting the jumps too high and making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion. Who can concentrate on a first drawing class when he is obsessing about having to divorce his wife and leave town?” (141)

“Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time – or at all.” (141)

“Creativity requires activity, and this is not good news to most of us. It makes us responsible, and we tend to hate that. You mean I have to do something in order to feel better?” (142)

“When we allow ourselves to wallow in the big questions, we fail to find the small answers.” (143)

“The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.” (152)

“What other people may view as discipline is actually a play date that we make with our artist child. I’ll meet you at 6:00 A.M. and we’ll goof around with that script, painting, sculpture…” (153)

“A successful creative career is always built on successful creative failures. The trick is to survive them.” (156)

“Note carefully that food, work, and sex are all good in themselves. It is the abuse of them that makes them creativity issues.” (164)

“The truth is, we are very often working to avoid ourselves, our spouses, our real feelings.” (166)

“Fame is not the same as success, and in our true souls we know that. We know – and have felt – success at the end of a good day’s work. But fame? It is addictive, and it always leaves us hungry.” (171)

“The point of the work is the work. Fame interferes with that perception. Instead of acting being about acting, it becomes about being a famous actor. Instead of wring being about writing, it becomes about being recognized, not just published.” (171)

“In the long run, fan letters from ourselves – and our creative self – are what we are really after. Fame is really a shortcut for self-approval. Try approving of yourself just as you are – and spoiling yourself rotten with small kid’s pleasures.” (172)

“As artists, we cannot afford to think about who is getting ahead of us and how they don’t deserve it. The desire to be better than can choke off the simple desire to be.” (173)

“This compare-and-contrast school of thinking may have its place for critics, but not or artists in the act of creation. Let the critics spot the trends. Let reviewers concern themselves with what is in and what is not. Let us concern ourselves first and foremost with what it is within us that is struggling to be born.” (173)

“The footrace mentality is always the ego’s demand to be not just good but also first and best. It is the ego’s demand that our work be totally original – as if such a thing were possible. All work is influenced by other work. All people are influenced by other people. No man is an island and no piece of art is a continent unto itself.” (174)

“Be willing to paint or write badly while your ego yelps resistance. Your bad writing may be the syntactical breakdown necessary for a shift in your style. Your lousy painting may be pointing you in a new direction. Art needs time to incubate, to sprawl a little, to be ungainly and misshapen and finally emerge as itself. The ego hates this fact. The ego wants instant gratification and the addictive hit of an acknowledged win.” (175)

“Being true to the inner artist often results in work that sells – but not always. I have to free myself from determining my value and the value of my work by my work’s market value.” (178)

“If I have a poem to write, I need to write that poem – whether it will sell or not.” (180)

“Sometimes I will write badly, draw badly, paint badly, perform badly. I have a right do that to get to the other side. Creativity is its own reward.” (180)

“As an artist, I write whether I think it’s any good or not. I shoot movies other people may hate. I sketch bad sketches to say, “I was in this room. I was happy. It was May and I was meeting somebody I wanted to meet.” (180)

“As an artist, my self-respect comes from doing the work. One performance at a time, one gig at a time, one painting at a time. Two and half years to make one 90-minute piece of film. Five drafts of one play. Two years working on a musical. Through it all, daily, I show up…” (181)

“As an artist, I do not need to be rich but I do need to be richly supported. I cannot allow my emotional and intellectual life to stagnate or the work will show it. My life will show it. My temperament will show it. If I don’t create, I get crabby.” (181)

“To be an artist is to recognize the particular. To appreciate the peculiar. To allow a sense of play in your relationship to accepted standards. To ask the question “Why?” To be an artist is to risk admitting that much of what is money, property, and prestige strikes you ask just a little silly.” (181)

“If you are happier writing than not writing, painting than not painting, singing than not singing, acting than not acting, directing than not direction, for God’s sake let yourself do it.” (182)

“To kill your dreams because they are irresponsible is to be irresponsible to yourself.” (182)

“Creativity is a spiritual practice. It is not something that can be perfected, finished, and set aside.” (182)

“Just when we get there, there disappears.” (182)

“The ruthless truth is that if we don’t keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die.” (182)

“The stringent requirement of a sustained creative life is the humility to start again, to begin anew.” (182)

“it is this willingness to once more be a beginner that distinguishes a creative career.” (182)

“Those who attempt to work too long with formula, even their own formula, eventually leach themselves of their creative truths.” (183)

“Creativity requires faith. Faith requires that we relinquish control. This is frightening, and we resist it.” (193)

“Joseph Campbell wrote, “Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.” (194)

“Bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.” (194)

“We speak often about ideas as brainchildren. What we do not realize is that brainchildren, like all babies, should not be dragged from the creative womb prematurely. Ideas, like stalactites and stalagmites, form in the dark inner cave of consciousness. They form in drips and drops, not by squared-off building blocks. We must learn to wait for an idea to hatch. Or, to use a gardening image, we must learn to not pull our ideas up by the roots to see if they are growing.” (194-195)

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” (195)

“Hatching an idea is a lot like baking bread. An idea need to rise. If you poke at it too much at the beginning, if you keep checking on it, it will never rise.” (195)

“It is a paradox of creativity that we must get serious about taking ourselves lightly. We must work at learning to play. Creativity must be freed from the narrow parameters of capital A art and recognized as having much broader play.” (196)

“As gray, as controlled, as dreamless as we may strive to be, the fire of our dreams will not stay buried. The embers are always there, stirring in our frozen souls like winter leaves. They won’t go away. They are sneaky. We make a crazy doodle in a boring meeting. We post a silly card on our office board. We nickname the boss something wicked. Plant twice as many flowers as we need.” (197)

“A little flattery can go a long way toward deterring our escape velocity. So can a little cash.” (199)

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” –Andre Gide (199)

“The first rule of magic is self-containment. You must hold your intention within yourself, stoking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest what you desire.” (199)

“In order to achieve escape velocity, we must learn to keep our own counsel, to move silently among doubters, to voice our plans only among our allies, and to name our allies accurately.” (199)

“Make a list: those friends who will support me. Make another list: those friends who won’t.” (199)

“I think the single most important factor in an artist’s sustained productivity… is what I call “a believing mirror.” Put simply, a believing mirror is a friend to your creativity – someone who believes in your and your creativity.” (219)

“Artists like other artists. We are not supposed to know this. We are encouraged to believe “there is only so much room at the top.” Hooey. Water seeks its own level and water rises collectively.” (220)

“Success occurs in clusters.” (220)

“As creative people, we are meant to encourage one another. That was my goal in writing The Artist’s Way and it is my goal in teaching it. Your goal. It is my hope, is to encourage each other’s dreams as well as your own.” (221)

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I recently read “It’s Always Something” by Gilda Radner. Here’s the quotes I found interesting:

“The news never meant anything to us on “SNL” because w always looked at it just to see how to satirize it. Nothing in our personal lives was sacred. We used all of it for material on the show. The most important thing was those ninety minutes live on Saturday night. So what if your whole world was falling apart as long as you could find a joke in it and make up a scene.” (99)

“It’s such an act of optimism to get up every day and get through a day and enjoy it and laugh and do all that without thinking about death.” (101)

“There’s that joke about the optimist who says, “If the house is full of shit there must be a pony somewhere.” (145)

“In the early day of “Saturday Night Live” we had our innocence and we believed in making comedy and making each other laugh. We were just working together to entertain, like kids playing together.” (153)

“While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die – whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.” (153)

“All the material for our show came from improvisation. We wrote our sketches on our feet in front of the audience, and rewrote them by repeating performances… I was a wreck.. It was the most stressful thing you could ever imagine. But there’s no other training ground like it for comedy writers and performers.” (164)

“You feel completely in control when you hear a wave of laughter coming back at you that you have caused. Probably that’s why people in comedy can be so neurotic and have so many problems. Sometimes we talk about it as a need to be loved, but I think with me it was also a need to control. I’ll make the decision whether to come out in my underwear or not.” (183)

“People whimpering and hovering over me made me feel like I was dying. People yelling at me made me feel alive.” (199)

“I’ve learned what I can control is whether I am going to live a day in fear and depression and panic, or whether I am going to attack the day and make it as good a day, as wonderful  day, as I can.” (200)

“Cancer is what you make of it. If you make it a horrible situation, so will everyone around you. I put humor into it and I opened the technicians up to their humor.” (206)

“People who know Bob, the head radiation technician, say he should be on television, but I said, “No, he should be in the radiation therapy department cause that is where his humor is needed most.” (207)

I recently re-read “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. It’s about the creative process and how to become more productive. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Here are the quotes I found most useful.

“This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance.” (22)

“What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead.” (30)

“Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed.” (34)

“Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery.” (37)

“The professional tackles the project that will make him stretch. He takes on the assignment that will bear him into uncharted waters, compel him to explore unconscious parts of himself.” (40)

“Resistance is directly proportional to love. If you’re feeling massive Resistance, the good news is, it means there’s tremendous love there too. If you didn’t love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.” (42)

“The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.” (43)

“Not only do I not feel alone with my characters; they are more vivid and interesting to me than the people in my real life. If you think about it, the case can’t be otherwise.” (46)

“In order for a book (or any project or enterprise) to hold our attention for the length of time it takes to unfold itself, it has to plug into some internal perplexity or passion that is of paramount importance to us.” (46)

“It’s one thing to study war and another to live the warrior’s life.” – Telamon of Arcadia (61)

“The amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a sideline, distinct from his “real” vocation. (63)

“The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time.” (63)

“The Principle of Priority states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what’s important first.” (65)

“The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.” (68)

“The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.” (68)

“We’re all pros already. 1) We show up every day 2) We show up no matter what 3) We stay on the job all day 4) We are committed over the long haul 5) The stakes for us are high and real 6) We accept renumeration for our labor 7) We do not overidentify with our jobs 8 ) We master the technique of our jobs 9) We have a sense of humor about our jobs 10) We receive praise or blame in the real world” (69-70)

“That’s when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.” (72)

“The professional, though he accepts money, does his work out of love. He has to love it. Otherwise he wouldn’t devote his life to it of his own free will.” (73)

“The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood.” (74)

“The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.” (75)

“The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her. Her artistic self contains many works and many performances. Already the next is percolating inside her. The next will be better, and the one after that better still.” (88)

“It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.” (90)

“Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.” (92)

“The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.” (93)

“I have a status meeting with myself every Monday. I sit down and go over my assignments. Then I type it up and distribute it to myself.” (98)

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” (108)

“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insight accrete.” (108)

“Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.” (112)

The muses poem:
“O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stay grievously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea-faring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. Vain hope – for them. The fools! Their own witlessness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.” – from Homer’s Odyssey (119)

“We’re not born with unlimited choices. We can’t be anything we want ot be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it.” (146)

“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” (146)

“If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice of the world, it’s our job to realize it and get down to business.” (146)

“At some point it maxes out. Our brains can’t file that many faces. We thrash around, flashing our badges of status (Hey, how do you like my Lincoln Navigator?) and wondering why nobody gives a shit.” (149)

“For the artist to define himself hierarchically is fatal… The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake.” (150-151)

“To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.” (151)

“A hack, Robert McKee says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for.” (152)

“The hack writes hierarchically. He writes what he imagines will play well in the eyes of others. He does not ask himself, “What do I myself want to write? What do I think is important? Instead he asks, What’s hot, what can I make a deal for?” (152)

“The hack is like the politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He’s a demagogue. He panders.” (152)

“It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.” (153)

“The muse had me, I had to do it. To my amazement, the book succeeded critically and commercially better than anything I’d ever done, and others since have been lucky too. Why? My best guess is this: I trusted what I wanted, not what I thought would work. I did what I myself thought was interesting, and left its reception to the gods.” (153)

“Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?” (158)

“If we were the last person on earth, would we still show up at the studio, the rehearsal hall, the laboratory?” (159)

“Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue.” (160)

“We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.” (161)

“That’s why an artist must be a warrior and, like all warriors, artists over time acquire modesty and humility. They may, some of them, conduct themselves flamboyantly in public. But alone with the work they are chaste and humble. They know they are not the source of the creations they bring into being. They only facilitate. They carry. They are the willing and skilled instruments of the gods and goddesses they serve.” (163)

“Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.” (165)

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