I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
I made 'Bowling for Columbine' in the hope the school shootings would stop and that we would address the issue of how easy it is to get a gun in the United States, and tragically, those school shootings continue.
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.
When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.
Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.
A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.
On the unofficial level it was a glorious moment in our national life because young people decided that this had to stop, that they could no longer stand the shedding of blood in this tragic adventure in Southeast Asia.
No, as it turns out, I really like being congratulated on my weight loss. I like it so much, it's tragic.
Without whining and without making myself a tragic figure, there is no replacement for the loss of your privacy. It's a huge sacrifice.
My tutors at drama school commended and criticised my use of comedy in my acting for a long time at drama school. They said I had a tendency to somehow perform the most tragic of scenes in a slightly flippant way.
Novelist: How tragic that man can never realize how beautiful life is until he is face to face with death.
Satine: Please tell me you're not one of Toulouse's oh so talented, charmingly bohemian, tragically impoverished writers?
Joe Gillis: There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five.
It seemed romantic but also tragic - people would be winning but then lose it all, or crash but fight on, break bones but get back on their bikes and try to finish. Just getting to the end was seen as an achievement in itself.
It is very sad about Michael Jackson, much as in the tragic cases of Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole and other celebrities who have died are a result of drugs. It is always sad when such a bright light goes out.
In world mythology, there are countless examples of tragic characters whose greatest strength is also the source of their undoing. But the ancient Greeks and Romans also held the view that acceptance is the beginning of wisdom.
Alvy Singer: Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.
Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane
