Top 100 Writing Humor Quotes
#1. My senior year of high school, I was voted 'Wittiest.' So, several years later, I decided to try my hand at writing humor to see if I could be witty enough to make some money.
Barbara Park
#2. With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.
Ian Frazier
#3. At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.
Richard Russo
#4. Writing humor is not something every single person can do.
Celia Rivenbark
#5. I had mostly been writing humor books, and my instinct is generally to go for the joke.
Jory John
#6. Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.
Art Buchwald
#7. Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece.
Ian Frazier
#8. And, you know, I liked writing humor. Well, I should say, I wanted to write seriously, but it kept turning funny.
Roseanne Barr
#10. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.
P.G. Wodehouse
#11. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
#12. Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.
Steve Martin
#13. I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I'm very well endowed.
Bauvard
#14. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#15. A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Robert Benchley
#16. Writing is my dream. From romance to dragons; fairies to fantasy worlds, this is where I live and play. Thanks be to God!
Lisa Hannah Wells
#17. Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time
life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.
Holly Lisle
#18. I'm not trying to please anyone. I'm just trying to write a damn book.
Richard P. Denney
#20. A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Mark Twain
#21. The easiest emotions for an author to evoke from readers are boredom and confusion.
Raul Ramos Y Sanchez
#22. Maybe we should all just shut up and read a good book.
Mary Sisney
#23. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.
Jane Austen
#24. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
Jonathan Lethem
#25. You know you've spent a lot of time writing fiction when you meet a new person and instead of asking them about what they do, or where they're from, you ask "what's your backstory?
David Filmore
#26. Why do you have to be out of town to write a postcard? I want a to write a postcard to my neighbor: "I still live near you!" The guy sees me go into my apartment, flips the card over, it's just a picture of me holding a rifle.
Jim Gaffigan
#27. Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick - then it's personal. The bad guy isn't just the "bad guy" anymore, he's the BAD GUY!
Michael J. Sullivan
#28. I'm writing a book about Siamese Twins that are attached at the nose. It's called: Stop Staring at Me!
Zach Galifianakis
#29. One of my book-reading friends used the term "our story unfolds" when describing a paper he was writing. He became somewhat less of a friend right at that moment.
Tommy Greenwald
#30. Martin: Yes, I'd like to go home and do some work. I'm writing a novel about women from the women's point of view.
Caryl Churchill
#31. Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.
Katrina Monroe
#32. Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story ... Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)
L.M. Montgomery
#33. Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.
Meagan Spooner
#34. Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write. I become extremely pathetic, very sensational. Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words.
Marjane Satrapi
#36. I have a reputation for doing superheroes, but I like all kinds of writing. In fact, hardly anybody knows this, but I've probably written as many humor stories as superhero stories.
Stan Lee
#37. Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain
#38. So now you have it. The plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot.
Elizabeth Peters
#39. I write most of my stories the way people talk, complete with an occasional run-on sentences and stuff that seems to go around in a few circles before making its point. In a comedy, you can do that.
Dan Alatorre
#40. As an author I'm in my head all day and I worry that I lose touch with reality. But then my dog pees on my shoe and I know I've found it again.
Michelle M. Pillow
#41. SAY EXACTLY
what you think
until you find that
no one is listening
then say
something else
Chocolate Waters
#42. It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise Erdrich
#43. Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..
Geoffrey Hill
#44. Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.
Mark Haddon
#46. People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question ... I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!
C.K. Webb
#47. When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, "You can do this. You've got what it takes." The other sounds like my mother-in-law.
Carla H. Krueger
#48. Love how editing makes you more confident with your book ...but also makes you want to set it on fire at the same time.
Kira Hawke
#49. It takes a thorough knowledge of the English language to effectively abuse it.
Charlene Vermeulen
#50. If I could split myself into five people, I would still be behind on my writing schedule. I see now why James Patterson cloned himself so many times.
Peter James West
#51. Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.
Lemony Snicket
#52. Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I think that's how I tap into it.
Kristan Higgins
#53. For me, that emotional payoff is what it's all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story ... or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.
Stephen King
#54. There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.
Tom Pappalardo
#55. Writers write, everyone else just talks about writing.
Various
#56. If you hear voices, you're a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you're an author.
Dani Harper
#57. I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]
Cormac McCarthy
#59. Not that I don't think irreverent humor and someone being filthy is funny, I just do what I do. Any comedian would admit throwing an f-bomb in there would help get a reaction ... I'm not on a Puritanical pursuit, but when I would curse in a joke, I believe I'm not done writing it.
Jim Gaffigan
#60. It seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.
Sarah Caudwell
#61. I never understood, what a starving artist was until I became one.
Mary Sage Nguyen
#62. I need a sound-proof room to tie up the inner critic, gag her and nail the door shut. But she keeps escapping. Poor knots and short nails.
Judy L Mohr
#63. I debated whether to tell them I had long since abandoned my writing career and moved into radishes and fraud, but decided the timing was wrong.
Susan Juby
#64. People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.
C. JoyBell C.
#65. Writing historical fiction is a legitimate use of Multiple Personality disorder.
Peggy Ullman Bell
#67. I feel guilty when I feed them unhealthy food they like. I feel guilty when I feed them healthy food they don't like. I feel guilty when I drop them off at school. I feel guilty when I pick them up at school. I feel guilty mostly for writing this book instead of spending time with them.
Jim Gaffigan
#68. Writing is like making love, editing is like giving your great grandfather a sponge bath.
Midnight Taylor
#69. I could spend the rest of my life writing and drawing books for kids and be a very happy man.
Daniel Sean Kaye
#70. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
Elizabeth McCracken
#71. I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.
Patton Oswalt
#72. LEARN FROM THE MASTERS:
Mark Twain once said, "Show, don't tell." This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like "Show, don't tell." Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.
Colin Nissan
#73. Sure, it will be hard, but all you need to be a writer is perseverance, a low-level alcohol dependency, and a questionable moral compass.
Anna Kendrick
#74. Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.
Woody Allen
#75. I'd be lying if I said killing off characters wasn't therapeutic in some way.
Eliza Green
#76. If you haven't heard a rumor by noon, make one up. If you're a writer, make sure it's a full page of the book you're currently working on.
Lamont Tanksley
#77. The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
#78. Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.
Dark Jar Tin Zoo
#79. I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.
Shelley Berman
#80. I've been writing poems since I was sixteen. Back then, poems were an obvious release for all the frustrations and anxieties associated with adolescence. Mostly, they were a way for me to impress girls, even though I never remember any girls being impressed.
Tony Magistrale
#81. Our parents are the coolest parents ever. No other generation went on from writing letters to their own parents to sending snapchats to their own kids.
Sharad Vivek Sagar
#82. Writing something new is an effective way to get rid of writer's block. Or you can observe the people around you and fantasize like I do.
B.A. Gabrielle
#83. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#84. About as much business as a cat owner has selling dog food. Or an Olympic swimmer has advertising for downhill ski equipment. Or a nun writing hard core erotica.
Abso-fucking-none.
Laurel Ulen Curtis
#85. The other one was filled with loud and obnoxious tourists. Always boasting on winning a sand castle competition and seeing who could get tanned first. What a whacky bunch of people.
Erica Sehyun Song
#86. My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I'm sitting in front of a typewriter.
Gary Reilly
#87. Ignore people who say you can't do it, even if this person is yourself.
Martha Reed
#88. HARV, can you help at all here?" I asked, spinning downward.
"I am writing your obituary. Well, not so much writing it as updating it," HARV told me.
If I lived, I was going to kill HARV.
John Zakour
#89. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#90. I think if you write humor, then people don't - you know - they don't give you that much credit. They tend to think you just dictate your stories into a tape recorder. And I'm not necessarily insulted by that, because I think that just means that it looks easy.
David Sedaris
#91. Fact is just fiction with different storytellers
Abby Slovin
#93. The leader gives me another hard stare. He's not very old, but he's going bald. His wispy pale hair looks like it's trying to get as far away as it can from his angry face.
Morris Gleitzman
#94. Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard
#95. My friend says she's smart. She reads a book to fall asleep.
Nicholaa Spencer
#96. Just remember, this is a collaborative effort. We don't have time for creative differences or outbreaks of artistic integrity.
Greg Cox
#97. Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.
J.P. Donleavy
#99. I didn't have a motive. I didn't to it. You did. What are you writing?"
"Motive - Don't know."
"What do you mean Don't know? I tell you I hadn't got one. Put None."
"You must have one. If you kill people without one, you're mad.
Pamela Branch
#100. About your writing with you left hand, are you ambidextrous, Mr. Ewell?"
"I most positively am not, I can use one hand good as the other. One hand good as the other.
Harper Lee
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