Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.

P. J. O'Rourke

Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

Ambrose Bierce

A humorist has to be taken seriously before he's considered a real writer.

Art Buchwald

There are people who can talk sensibly about a controversial issue; they're called humorists.

Cullen Hightower

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

David Sedaris

To say that a humorist exaggerates to get big laughs, I don't see how that's big news.

David Sedaris

But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.

David Sedaris

I'm essentially a humorist and, I think, a pretty good one. I've known all along that 'My Friend Dahmer' is the one book I'll be most known for, and in a way, that's a drag, as it's nothing like the rest of the work I've done or will do moving forward. But the way I figure, it's better to have a best-known work than not to have one at all.

Derf

Great humorists are great insulters.

Dick Cavett

I'm not a comic. I'm a humorist.

Dick Gregory

A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

Don Herold

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

Erma Bombeck

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

Garrison Keillor

That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?

Howard Jacobson

Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn't have to be profound, and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative.

James Gleick

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

James Thurber

Reactionary conservatives are smiling through the racial apocalypse. To them, race baiting is a joke, as 'humorist' Rush Limbaugh will tell you when he's calling Mexicans 'stupid.' Or it's a matter of semantics when they claim that Sonia Sotomayor is a 'racialist' which, far as I can tell, is the smooth jazz version of being a racist.

John Ridley

Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.

John Scalzi

In Czechoslovakia, we consider Kafka a very funny man. A humorist.

Milos Forman

Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.

P. J. O'Rourke

A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.

P. J. O'Rourke