‘Fargo’ is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable, and that’s what makes it tragic. It’s about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same.
My positions on gun safety have remained consistent over the years, and have been on my website for years. Whether I’m in a tough re-election race, an easy re-election race, or if it isn’t an election year, whether there’s a high-profile tragedy in the news or otherwise, my position remains unchanged and on my website.
Apart altogether from our own vital interests, we cannot and must not desert those other nations who have already gone through so much tragedy and suffering to defeat the evil designs of the Axis powers.
It’s a fantastic mirror to us to engage with art, to engage with paintings that are about tragedy, to go see Shakespearean comedies, to read a Greek play… We have always investigated the lightness and darkness of the human soul, in all these forms. So why not do it on television?
Oftentimes, experiencing tragedy very young can strangely give you a kind of equilibrium.
To me, the tragedy about this whole image-obsessed society is that young girls get so caught up in just achieving that they forget to realize that they have so much more to offer the world.
There are some stunning visual moments in ‘Arrival’ that are out of this world, but it’s all on the earth, and it’s about an academic, a woman that is dealing with a personal tragedy, but there’s a circular view of time that makes things more complicated.
The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we’re passing one another without a look of recognition.
Venezuelans live on 3 dollars a month. That’s a tragedy. That is impossible to survive under these conditions.
Literature transcends national boundaries, racial boundaries. It goes deep into the issues that concern all human beings. That is why, when people read Greek tragedy – it doesn’t matter who reads it – they are still moved by it.
I often find in doing tragedy, or doing very serious material, that there’s a level of anxiety that builds that often leads to laughter in some cases. In between takes, there can often be a lightness.
If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.
The existence of the Taliban, in my view, is a tragedy for Afghanistan. We as Americans need to understand our role in helping bring that tragedy about. So I think it’s important to look at the stories about why these people are fighting.
I don’t think I tell stories of tragedy. I think I tell stories of love. Even though you’re full of tears, I hope that you leave the theatre with your heart feeling like it’s going to explode out of your chest. And yes, you’ve been through the tragedy, but it’s ultimately hope that I think you’re left with.
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
With time, art developed Bip, my alter ego. He was not only a lion tamer or a street musician but a soldier revealing the tragedy of ephemeral life.
You don’t have to say something directly to affect someone. You can make a piece of music without words that can capture a feeling of tragedy or struggle or anger or triumph. It’s the translation of the human experience into another form.
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
It is a tragedy indeed that new generations, taking office, attribute failures in governance to insufficient power, and seek more of it.
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.
One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.
My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.
As an actor, I’m not sure what I had to offer the world of tragedy and comedy when I was 21. I hadn’t lived a whole lot. By my middle 30s, you know, I had been knocked around a little bit.
The tragedy is that so many have ambition and so few have ability.
I had a lot of strong women around my whole life who were survivors. My grandma survived breast cancer twice and the death of her child and the death of her brother, and, you know, just a lot of tragedy, and she’s still the happiest person I’ve ever met.
In Kurosawa’s films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn’t put it down – I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
I think everybody has tragedy in their life. Everybody has hurdles in their life. Everybody has tough things to overcome. My kids say to me, ‘This isn’t fair.’ I said, ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Everybody has their issues. It’s how you handle your issues that distinguishes you.
It’s every woman’s tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we’ve known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.
Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.
There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
I never did comedy or tragedy. I just live a situation and my mission is to entertain people.
More than any other setting – more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel – I’ll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
It would behoove the world to become used to this fact: that without a just solution to the Palestine tragedy, there can be no stable peace in the Middle East.
The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting.
We hope to do the Spanish Tragedy based on the play by Thomas Kyd.
I think that if I was only known for who I was as a football player and only that, it just would have been a tragedy.
Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.
Art is important because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like ‘Guernica.’ People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting.
What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.
Everyone deals with tragedy in his own way.
The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.
I’ve had tragedy in my life, but I think that gives me a depth that I can bring to my work. I’d like to see more older women on TV because they can bring that life experience and emotion to a performance.
Clearly, we are courting tragedy by turning a blind eye to marketing gimmicks plainly intended to turn children into gun enthusiasts before they are even old enough to buy a firearm of their own.
My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.
I think it’s a great tragedy of childhood that you only really appreciate it once it’s done: it’s very hard to feel appreciative of the gifts you have until you’re gone.
Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy.
Boxing is made for film – there is corruption, violence, tragedy and the chance that the underdog can catch the champion with one lucky punch.
The environment was so strong, so dramatic. Tragedy is all over Calabria; it’s in the air. All this corresponds to my temperament.
The script for ‘Infamous’ was so poised between tragedy and comedy. It’s a dream part. One reads those scripts with a sense of melancholia. When you read a script that good… I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this script is too good. They’ll never give it to me.’
In high drama or high tragedy or anything, it’s not really human unless there’s some humor at the same time. And vice versa. So I guess I tend to gravitate towards projects which tread a dodgy tightrope between two things, which aren’t really one or another.
