Source: Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
“What’s the point in having humor? Humor is to get us over terrible things.”
“Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.”
Introduction to Shatterday (1980), p. 2
Context: I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.
“Love--the most wonderful and most terrible thing in the world.”
Source: Gabriela, Clavo y Canela
1961
Source: Conversation with Harold Macmillan, in Bermuda (1961) as recounted by Richard Reeves in his book President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1994)
As quoted in BBC interview with David Wigg (8 May 1969) http://web.archive.org/web/20080121033938/http://www.geocities.com/~beatleboy1/db1969.0508.beatles.html
Context: That's part of our policy, is not to be taken seriously, because I think our opposition, whoever they may be, in all their manifest forms, don't know how to handle humor. You know, and we are humorous, we are, what are they, Laurel and Hardy. That's John and Yoko, and we stand a better chance under that guise, because all the serious people, like Martin Luther King, and Kennedy, and Gandhi, got shot.
Source: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
" News duo thinking young http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0%2C1249%2C565037325%2C00.html" by David Bauder, Deseretnews.com (2003-12-09)
"Answer #3" at his official website. http://www.chickcorea.com/from_chick.html
Context: I believe that any "awareness" of life is "spiritual" since awareness can only be a quality of the spirit not of the material world or of matter and machines. Only a spiritual being has awareness. But if you mean "spiritual" in the sense of a kind of "celebration of Life", then yes, I write music to celebrate life. I think most artists do, no matter how they themselves describe it. It's the joy of creating. It's a way of life.
