If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

I always approach comedy roles pretending they aren't funny.

The key is just to ignore the pain because physical comedy only works if you see someone get hurt and they aren't actually hurt. If someone gets hit in the face with a bat falls down and gets back up it's funny. If they stay down and their jaw is wired shut in the next scene it's really tragic and weird. You have to pretend it doesn't hurt.

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

My parents are very funny when they have to deal with anything racy or off-color. They usually pretend they don't speak English.

I got attention by being funny at school pretending to be retarded and jumping around with a deformed hand.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.

I don't need to go onto Facebook and pretend to have friends I've never even met. To my mind that kind of destroys the meaning of the word 'friend.' I take exception to that. Because I value and respect friendship.

When the entertainers of the Right aren't declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates they're pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug an exemplar of what they call 'the Chicago way.'

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.

We often pretend to fear what we really despise and more often despise what we really fear.

There are divers men who make a great show of loyalty and pretend to such discretion in the hidden things they hear that at the end folk come to put faith in them.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither in my experience do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

You are about to have your first experience with a Greek lunch. I will kill you if you pretend to like it.