Top 48 Self Parody Quotes
#1. When making his music, he [Elvis Presley] had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scrips for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.
Dean Koontz
#2. Barry White seemed so filled with self-parody at first that it was easy to dismiss him. But it is becoming increasingly obvious with every additional release that he is a very talented man.
Jon Landau
#3. Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody.
Bruno Schulz
#5. There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
Tobias Wolff
#6. Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
John Updike
#7. Anybody who does not evolve can become a self-parody. I have to evolve on a daily basis just to keep my own interest in what I do.
Marilyn Manson
#8. Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one."
Tariq Ali
#9. I too was a little embarrassed by my recent topless 'scandal' and the subsequent parodies.
Jamie Lee Curtis
#10. Thanksgiving dinner with my family is awesome," I deadpanned. "Now drink your gold before somebody comes along and mutates you into a twisted parody of humanity.
Seanan McGuire
#12. Memories of the last nine years have turned Ground Zero from a site of horror, to a reminder of grief, to an occasion for ludicrous artistic posturing - and now to something very close to parody.
John Podhoretz
#13. The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#14. Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article.
Nathan Poe
#15. By the very nature of satire or parody, you have to love and respect your target and respect it enough to understand every aspect of it, so you can more effectively make fun of it.
T. J. Miller
#16. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.
Joseph Conrad
#17. It's hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.
Al Yankovic
#18. Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony
Judith Butler
#19. To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.
Daniel Libeskind
#20. It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
Georges Bataille
#21. I want to leave all my friends and the sunlight for a small, rainy town.
The Harvard Lampoon
#22. I'm a music fan, and I can listen to the radio, or music, without thinking, "How am I going to screw this up?" [Laughs] If I'm really actively trying to think of a parody, then I'll have my antenna out, and be a little more proactive about it.
Al Yankovic
#23. The first acting thing I ever did was my senior year I decided not to play a sport in the Spring and, in that Spring B.J. Novak who went to school with me, asked if I'd be in this show that was a parody of all the teachers in the school, 'sure!' That was the first acting thing I did.
John Krasinski
#24. The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.
Christopher Buckley
#25. The people are so small, they look like ants (although they're Walmart customers, so they look like obese ants).
Andrew Shaffer
#26. Cynical, self-deprecating, affected, indiscriminate, patronizing, immature, as sloppy intellectually as he was with his desk, fickle, vain, virile, brooding, pedantic, philandering...in short, Byronic, Byronic, Byronic, almost to the point of parody.
Laura Elizabeth Woollett
#27. No one should ever take them self or others too seriously."
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#28. A typical 'Larry King Live' is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he's strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject.
James Wolcott
#29. I looked over at Edwart. It occurred to me that I had never seen him in direct sunlight. Interestingly enough, I had also never seen him sparkle. Could the two be related?
The Harvard Lampoon
#30. I took the one letter he had for us. It was from the Switchblade Gas & Electric Company. I didn't know I had admirers there too, but I wasn't that surprised. I threw it in the trash with the IRS's love letters and closed the door without reply.
The Harvard Lampoon
#31. I have chosen to parody the writing styles of Carlos Castaneda, James Redfield, Richard Bach, Lynn Andrews, and several other best-selling new age authors.
Frederick Lenz
#32. If you aim for parody right off the bat and it misses, no offense to the filmmakers, but it is Meet the Spartans.
Adam McKay
#33. Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life.
Glen Duncan
#34. Tallish. Check. Built like a bull. Check. Were there tingles in her downstairs department? Mmhmm. Check. Her pearly gates had gone into override and the doors were ready to burst open.
Cari Silverwood
#36. It's a sort of piss-take on culture, because a drag queen is a clown - a parody of our society. It's a sarcastic spoof on culture, which allows us to laugh at ourselves - but in a way that is inclusive of everyone.
RuPaul
#37. Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody.
Rory Bremner
#38. Tolerance is a cheap, low-grade parody of love. Tolerance is not a great virtue to aspire to. Love is much tougher and harder.
N. T. Wright
#39. Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
Terry Eagleton
#40. May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.
James Russell Lowell
#41. Two buttons had come adrift on her shirt, meaning she was showing more cleavage than was normal for an officer of the law. I don't know if she had children, or planned to, but they would never starve.
Stephen Arnott
#42. I just want to kind of tackle every kind of form that exists in the comedy world; whether it be stand-up or hidden camera or parody. Kind of slap it in a movie with hip-hop artists and actors, comedians and girls. I just want to do something fun.
Pauly Shore
#43. The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#45. I'm parodied as being some right-wing fundamentalist extremist, it just isn't true. The parody doesn't reflect reality.
Pat Robertson
#46. Dizzy Gillespie recorded it with Charlie Parker in an
influential 1945 track (incorporating a much imitated intro - perhaps initially
intended as a parody of Rachmaninoff 's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor
Ted Gioia
#47. For years the first of May was the day all leases expired, and on that day mass migrations would take place, with families lugging eiderdowns and ancestral portraits through the streets, as if in parody of the march of the wagon trains.
Luc Sante
#48. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the future, and everything sucked.
Greg Nagan
