Today, young girls measure the quality of their beauty based upon its entertainment value. The more people are entertained by their beauty, the more beautiful they think they must be. This is very unfortunate and I would like young girls to know that their beauty is a crown; not a clown. And crowns are best worn with elegance and serenity.

You laugh because what's fearful and unknown is also what's funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny... But it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power.

Good madonna, give me leave toprove you a fool.

Just because everyone is behaving like a clown, it doesn’t mean you have to join the circus.

The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.

A red nose is the clown's mask and my moustache is mine.

A red nose is the clown's mask and my moustache is mine.

I got through my teen years by being a bit of a clown.

For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . But alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.

Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.