I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

When you seek, you find things you did not anticipate.

I tend to head for what's amusing because a lot of things aren't happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time...

I think these are some of the common themes [of my work]: a) life is hard, brutal, capricious and unfair, b) sometimes there is a benefit to seeing it clearly, and acknowledging it truthfully..., and c) other times it is best to find something to laugh about, lest despair crush one completely. I find a lot of humor in shocking or so-called taboo things: castration, excrement, violence (usually self-inflicted or inflicted on the narrator, "[Martin] Scorsese" being an exception), sex and sexual perversions... etc.

I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I have ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. And they made me laugh, and get angry, and be happy, and be sad, and excited, and even fall in love a little....And they didn’t seem to be so weird or strange anymore.

I pity people who can't find laughter or at least some bit of amusement in the little doings of the day. I believe I could find something ridiculous even in the saddest moment, if necessary. It has nothing to do with being superficial. It's a matter of joy in life.

One thing was certain: when someone searched into secret places, he often came up with things he would rather not have found.

I can't begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.

There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.

I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily the popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish me for this and rob me of these treasures, I carefully hid them in secret places where I could enjoy them unmolested. As I grew older, my love for strange stories became even stronger, and I learned of things stranger than what I had read in my childhood. When I was in my thirties my memory was full of these stories accumulated through years of eager seeking. [...] I have sometimes laughingly said to myself that it is not I who have found these ghosts and monsters, but they, the monstrosities themselves, which have found me!

In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare moments loathsome, but at my best unapproachably great.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.