Tom Leykis's Quotes

I'm looking forward to providing the men of Seattle with an evening where they can kick back, light up a cigar and enjoy a night to themselves. Women, we can't technically keep you out, but please stay at home.

There's a difference... between the kind of woman you would bang and the kind of woman you would marry.

There's some benefit to being happy in your life. Of looking around and saying, 'This is mine.'

I don't just preach; I put my money where my mouth is!

There really is no Johnny Carson anymore. There is no one place a comedian can appear and explode.

When I saw houses in Palmdale going for $500K, I knew something was wrong. If you got foreclosed, I don't feel sorry for you!

I wanted to see if you could put a prototype radio station on the Internet so you wouldn't have to invest $50 million or $100 million or $150 million to buy a transmitter and a frequency.

I don't walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. It's worse than bleak, it's apocalyptic.

I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.

I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.

I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.

I think to simply make fun of something isn't particularly interesting. I try to not just do a parody of something or belittle something or disparage something.

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.

When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

Writing a play, you have to retain it all in your head - you need more time. With prose, you can snatch an hour here, an hour there.

I think women often have problems with self-belief, which sounds a bit boring, but they do - and I think when women are bringing up children, it can be chronic, because you have all these other calls on your time.