Simon Rich Quotes

There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.

At the end of the day I’m writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.

I never felt ostracized or made to feel strange by obsessing over ‘The Onion’ or ‘Calvin and Hobbes.’ That was considered completely normal.

I never really liked “cool” books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.

People are funny in like young adulthood, just like how people’s musical tastes are cool, but it changes very rapidly. In five or ten years, I’ll probably still be confident about what’s funny but it probably won’t be funny anymore.

I try not to write jokes that are mean. I try my best to write jokes that are pretty universal and jokes that don’t attack anyone. I know I often fall short of that and end up taking unfair swipes at people, but I try not to.

I was never a cool person; in fact, cool people have always made fun of me. That’s why I loved [the Robert Cormier YA novel] The Chocolate War – because the cool kids (not the establishment) were the villains. I totally identified with that.