“The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one.”

“Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.”

“The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.”

“He was a secretive man, who kept his own counsel. He was an ambitious man of humble origins, with colossal designs on the future. And it would always be advantageous not to be closely known, never to be transparent. Passing a farmer on a day, he would tip his hat and grin. Everybody knew him. Nobody knew him. He would play the fool, the clown, the melancholy poet dying for love, the bumpkin. He would take the world by stealth and not by storm. He would disarm enemies by his apparent naiveté, by seeming pleasantly harmless. He would go to such lengths in making fun of his own appearance that others felt obliged to defend it. -Daniel Mark Epstein.”

“The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another.”

“There are only two types of people in this world; people who hate clowns, and clowns.”