Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Bes...ides, there isn't going to be any war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do.... I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one attaches a transcendent meaning to the "errors" of comedy, much less of farce. Mistaken identities, misunderstandings about... what some character said or meant, mistakes about bedroom doors--these help to complicate the plot and are all part of the fun. On the level of farce, Oedipus was mistaken about the identity of his parents, he misunderstood the true significance of what the oracle said, and he went into the wrong bedroom.... The difference in tragedy is that the errors are fatal and that, although they can be dissipated at the end, their consequences cannot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a damned place--to be sure--but the only one in the world (at least in the English world) for fun--though I have seen parts ...of the globe that I like better--still upon the whole it is the completest either to help one in feeling oneself alive, or forgetting that one is so.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a great huge game of chess that's being played--all over the world--if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is...! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn't mind being a Pawn, if only I might join--though of course I should like to be a Queen, best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron's revealing line, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep," suggests that the comic sense is parasitic...al upon the tragic. In order to avoid our tragic encounters with the transitoriness of passing fact, the fading of beauty, the destructive consequences of moral evil, alienation from the primary source of value, we make fun. The making of fun where no real occasion for fun exists is essentially what comedy is about. Tragedy and comedy are, indeed, but two masks worn by the same character alternately, depending on the exigencies of the moment; that is, depending upon which mask best represents him in such a way as successfully to reduce the unacceptable tensions of his ambience. Thus the obvious truth of Socrates' argument at the end of the Symposium. Both tragedy and comedy are but one-sided expressions of the ironic sensibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Living each day as a preparation for the next is an exciting way to live. Looking forward to something is much more fun than looki...ng back at something--and much more constructive. If we can prepare ourselves so that we never have to think, "Oh, if I had only known, if I had only been ready," our lives can really be the great adventure we so passionately want them to be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »