“It may be that comedy touches such deep emotions that people feel better if they can just dismiss it as trivial.”

You can teach taste, editorial sense, but the ability to say something funny is something I’ve never been able to teach anyone.

Glamour: the indefinable something about a girl with a big bosom.

You throw a perfectly straight line at the audience and then, right at the end, you curve it. Good jokes do that.

Just take a big belly laugh. I have watched people laughing, and for a moment they look-and are-absolutely helpless. . You can be assaulted while you are laughing.

The fact is that comedy is actually too serious to be taken seriously.

Someone once defined humor as a way to keep from killing yourself. I keep my sense of humor and I stay alive.

Vulnerability..You can be assaulted while you are laughing.

Today I realize that once you have made a mistake, you must accept it, profit by it, and then totally dismiss it from your mind.

Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God never will.

Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

First gave in to the urge to pray to their sense of something greater than themselves and interpreted certain signs or events or silences as responses to those prayers.

The fact is that comedy is actually too serious to be taken seriously.

Don’t use hustling as an avoidance mechanism to dismiss your emotions.