Then after that came word processors and it's hard to make those laugh.

And if you can offer an explanation as to why it doesn't work then you've got to the whole root of comedy.

I defy anyone to get a decision that quickly these days.

There's an unseen force which lets birds know when you've just washed your car.

I used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny.

If the laughter of the audience was malicious we wouldn't show it.

Then after that came word processors and it's hard to make those laugh.

Frank liked administrative work and was good at it.

The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.

Everyone who appears in a scene gets paid.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

And when you're on your own there is that terrifying possibility that you may be the only person on the planet who thinks it's funny - and you have no way of finding out.

I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

In a word, if any kind of slavery can be vindicated by the Holy Scriptures, we are already sure our making and holding the Negroes our slaves, as we do, cannot be vindicated by any thing we can find there, but is condemned by the whole of divine revelation.

It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

These things don't just come, arrive and settle like a bird picking up a few bits of crumbs. They develop. I think the best word for these things is develop. They develop because of the human beings who just happen to be there at the time.

The word 'romance,' according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

Obedience to the word in humility of mind never confuses.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Often we can help each other most by leaving each other alone; at other times we need the hand-grasp and the word of cheer.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true.

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.

Any political party that includes the word 'democratic' in its name, isn't.

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

The word diva to me means doing something supernatural with something natural.

India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples.

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Don't hate the word, playa; hate the dictionary.

The word 'Antichrist', to me, is the collective disbelief in god.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

Don't use that foreign word "ideals." We have that excellent native word "lies."

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.