Aziz Ansari Quotes

There's something uniquely valuable in everyone, and we'll be much happier and better off if we invest the time and energy it takes to find it. But seriously, if the person doesn't clip their toenails or wear clean socks, look elsewhere. There are plenty of options.

...when we have more options, we are actually less satisfied and sometimes even have a harder time making a choice at all.

I think when people talk about improvising it turns into this silly thing like, "Oh there's like a hula hoop there and I'm like 'Oh what's going on here? Is this a really big ring?'"

I have no interest in art. Let me clarify - I have no interest in non-nude images.

Some are clearly so confused that they have taken to wearing fedoras. A difficult period indeed.

Every time, she spelled it "hoo." He said it ruined everything. (NOTE: We did confirm that this was a woman and not an owl.)

With stand-up, I can have an idea, go down the street to a comedy club and work on it, flesh it out, book a venue, people will come, then film it. I do all that myself; I never have to answer to anybody.

Come cook food with me and do nothing.

Even in my stand-up, there's a lot more positivity and enthusiasm rather than negative, I-hate-everything vibes.

I was surprised to learn that research showed arranged couples tended to be happier in the long run.

Aren't you scared your kid's getting kidnapped ... RIGHT NOW?

The key, Dinesh said, is to have friends who hang out in different groups in different places, and to mix up the nights so that you're spending some time with all of them. Whether it's in church, with volunteer groups, at office parties, or on a sports field, it's always a place where people meet organically.

So many gay jokes tonight about (James) Franco. Apparently if you're clean, well dressed and mildly cultured, you're super gay now. Is that why the rest of you guys are so aggressively fat and dirty? You think if you read one book and take a shower, dicks are going to just fly into your face.

The problem is that this search for the perfect person can generate a lot of stress. Younger generations face immense pressure to find the "perfect person" that simply didn't exist in the past when "good enough" was good enough. When they're successful, though, the payoff is incredible.

I can't think of any bank robbery comedy where it's about two normal guys. It's kind of like Superbad meets Heat, which is a cool combo, and it's just fun doing a normal guy that's robbing a bank.

It's hard to really get that excited about movies. Think about it like this: how many good comedy movies come out a year? Maybe one or two? And then, in those movies, what are the chances that there's a character that I'm the best fit to play? It's really small!

One girl raved about a nice voicemail a guy had recently left her. I kindly requested she play it and heard this gem: 'Hey, Lydia. It's Sam. Just calling to say what's up. Gimme a ring when you get a chance.'

THAT WAS IT.

I pleaded to know what was so great about this. She sweetly recalled that 'he remembered my name, he said hi, and he told me to call him back.'

Never mind the fact that what she described was the content of LITERALLY EVERY VOICE MAIL IN HISTORY. Name, hello, please call back. Not really a boatload of charm on display. To fail this test, a guy would have to leave a message that said: 'No greeting. This is man. I don't remember you. End communication.

Another poll, from Gallup, found that infidelity is more universally disapproved of than polygamy, animal cloning, and suicide.11 So if there were two guys at a bar, one cheating on his wife and another with a cloned pig named Bootsie, it would be the cheater, not Bootsie the pig, getting more disapproving looks.

Come on, man, I got a full beard!

When I've really been in love with someone, it's not because they looked a certain way or liked a certain TV show or a certain cuisine. It's more because when I watched a certain TV show or ate a certain cuisine with them, it was the most fun thing ever.

Everyone steals. My favorite movie is Love Don't Cost a Thing with Nick Cannon. Which is based on Can't Buy Me Love, which is based on Kramer vs. Kramer, or something, which I think was Shakespeare.

Emily told us. "I would never go on a first date somewhere in my town because I know all the waiters. I know all the bartenders. I know everybody.

In the United States there's an optimistic expectation that most people will remain faithful to their partner, but actual data show great numbers of people will not.

No one's trying to get with jugglers.

What's up with these people and the food analogies?!

After the rings, the priest should just say, "Enjoy it, bing-bongs. Due to our brain's tendency toward hedonic adaptation, you won't feel quite this giddy in a few years. All right, where's the pigs in a blanket? I'm outta here.

I have a couple of 'doing caps' in my wallet. That's what I call condoms.

I weirdly do consider myself an optimist about love.

The four sweetest words in the English language - 'You wore me down.'

This gets into a fundamental change in how marriage is viewed. Today we see getting married as finding a life partner. Someone we love. But this whole idea of marrying for happiness and love is relatively new.

Some comedians will tour and do these classic bits all the time. But now with YouTube and Comedy Central, people see your stuff, and they don't want to hear you do that again.

(On a side note, I would give pretty much anything to have been in the room where the guy said, "I've got it! We'll call it . . . Soapland!")

When I'm dating someone, I have a list called my 'Oh No Nos.' If a woman commits a Oh No No, it can end the relationship. Not loving '90s R&B music is #3 on the Oh No Nos list. Girl don't
even know who Ginuwine is.

Others fear what the morrow may bring. I am afraid of what happened yesterday.

Other than friends and family, my favorite things are New York and stand-up. I love doing comedy in New York - I can do way more stand-up here than in Los Angeles.

Marriage was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love," writes Coontz.

It can take a few months to get a new 10 minutes. Usually it takes like 10 times of repeatedly trying different variations of a joke until I land on one I think is really good.

But this whole idea of marrying for happiness and love is relatively new. For

Being a rapper is about being cool, but being a comedian, you're not supposed to be the coolest guy.

If your job was remotely interesting, there would be a show on A&E about it.

When you look at your phone and see a text from a potential partner, you don't always see another person - you often see a little bubble with text in it. And it's easy to forget that this bubble is actually a person.

This is one of my favorite pick up strategies: I'm constantly giving women my keys. So far, none of them have shown up. Matter of time. And I've been robbed twice.

Today the average age of first marriage is about twenty-seven for women and twenty-nine for men, and it's around thirty for both men and women in big cities like New York and Philadelphia.

They are more invested in the deep commitment to the relationship, rather than being personally invested in finding a soul mate, which can tend to lead to the "Is there something better out there for me?" mentality.

Companionate love is neurologically different from passionate love. Passionate love always spikes early, then fades away, while companionate love is less intense but grows over time. And, whereas passionate love lights up the brain's pleasure centers, companionate love is associated with the regions having to do with long-term bonding and relationships. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, the author of Anatomy of Love and one of the most cited scholars in the study of sex and

Everyone's first thought is "These women are going to take advantage of you" or "Someone's only going to date you because you're famous." That stuff's not really an issue because that's super-easy to see through.

Every single person, pretty much, is taught what they're supposed to do: go to school, get a job, find someone to love, get married, have kids, raise the kids, and then die. Nobody questions that. What if you want to do something different?

Finding someone today is probably more complicated and stressful than it was for previous generations - but you're also more likely to end up with someone you are really excited about. Our

That's one reason why today meeting in bars or in the neighborhood is far less common among LGBT couples than it used to be, and why nearly 70 percent of LGBT couples meet online. (BLT couples - bacon, lettuce, and tomato couples - are inanimate objects and are not engaging in romantic pursuits.)

I'm so jealous of people who have crushes on people they go to school with or work with. That's such a blessing. You actually get to see them all the time and spend time with them.

For the majority of the time, I may as well have been just a really tan white kid. You know, I may as well have just been, like, a fat kid.

...social media and the internet are introducing all kinds of new options into social and romantic life. And while it's exciting, sometimes even exhilarating, to have more choices, it's not necessarily making life easier.

I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. Ideally, though, we're lucky, and we find our soul mate and enjoy that life-changing mother lode of happiness. But a soul mate is a very hard thing to find.

Any jokes I make I try to make sure it's on story and helps the characters and makes sense with the movie.

If you are in a big city or on an online dating site, you are flooded with options. Seeing all these options, like the people in the job example, are we now comparing our potential partners not to other potential partners but rather to an idealized person whom no one could measure up to?

Like most fedora wearers, he had a lot of inexplicable confidence.

The hardest part about rollerblading is telling your parents you're gay.

The whole idea of love is scary - so is being with someone for the rest of your life and being happy with them for the rest of your life. There's lots of research to suggest that, actually, love's not really that simple.

London seems to be a town with a lot of comedy fans and people that really enjoy stand-up.

I just think it's sad that the main places in our culture that we designate to meet new people are bars and nightclubs..

I entered the word "crisis" into Thesaurus.com, it suggested "hot potato" as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know that Thesaurus.com lists "hot potato" as a synonym for "crisis.

Do It Under the Influence Yourself! That's what we're shooting for! Get drunk and make your dreams come true.

Do you realize how much better the world would be if we all just treated each other the same way black dudes treat magicians?

I am a sexually confident woman who made a video for someone she cared about. If someone I knew saw the images and judged me negatively for making them, I feel confident that the problem is with them, not with me... So when I sext with my boyfriend, the main goal is to get us off. But it's also my little way of reassuring myself that I decide what to do with my body, and I get to decide which risky behaviors are worth taking.

In this era, we have more choice than any group of people ever. When you are out at night, anyone in the universe can contact you instantly. Think about how crazy that is compared to even a few decades ago.

There's lots of competition for attractive women, and women get much higher hit rates than men. Granted. But in the midst of this he also said something incredible: "I got approximately 350 matches in 5 months." That's seventy people a month. Twenty years ago, if you met a guy who said he'd met seventy women who'd expressed

You get all these different cuts of meat cooking at once' he said. 'You've got your sausage, which cooks fast. You've got your big steak, which is your best cut, which takes some time, right? You got to talk to all these girls at once just like you take care of all that meat at once'

After he made this analogy, I presented Ajay with a trophy that said 'Most Sexist Food Analogy of All Time: Meat and BBQ division'.

that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining. When we did the large focus group where we split the room by generation - kids on the left, parents on the right - a strange thing happened. Before the show started, we noticed that the parents' side of the room was full of chatter. People were talking to one another and asking how they had ended up at the event and getting to know people. On the kids' side, everyone was buried in their phones and not talking to anyone around them.

Why do we all say we prefer honesty but rarely give that courtesy to others? Maybe in our hearts we all want to give others honesty, but in practice it's just too damn hard. Honesty is confrontational. Crafting the 'honest' message takes a lot of time and thought. And no matter how delicately you do it, it feels cold and mean to reject someone. It's just easier on many levels to say nothing or pretend to be busy until people get the picture.

Bye." [sad] Aron published another study, titled "Couples' Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality" (damn, dude, shorten the names of your studies!),

A century ago people would find a decent person who lived in their neighborhood. Their families would meet and, after they decided neither party seemed like a murderer, the couple would get married and have a kid, all by the time they were twenty-two. Today people spend years of their lives on a quest to find the perfect person, a soul mate.

Sometimes there's another reason that people take so long to text you back: They aren't playing mind games or busy. They're just GOOGLING THE FUCK OUT OF YOU.

If thou canst walk on water, thou art no better than a straw. If thou canst fly in the air, thou art no better than a fly. Conquer thy heart that thou mayest become somebody.

Once you become a comedian, you accept that people are just going to yell stuff at you.

And now I'm at home on a laptop again, typing out stuff for this chapter that you are reading right now, possibly on a screen as well!

divorced and living with an iguana, remarried with iguana, then divorced with seven iguanas because your iguana obsession ruined your relationship, and, finally, single with six iguanas (Arturo was sadly run over by an ice cream truck).

Schwartz is an encyclopedia of psychological research on choice problems. If asked to give a quote about him for the back of a book cover, I would say, "This motherfucker knows choice." As

The interesting thing about text is that, as a medium, it separates you from the person you are speaking with, so you can act differently from how you would in person or even on the phone.

The couples that did the novel and exciting activities showed a significantly greater increase in relationship quality.

When you found someone you liked, you jumped into a relationship. I don't think we thought, Well, there are another twelve doors or another seventeen doors or another four hundred and thirty-three doors," she said. "We saw a door we wanted, and so we took it." Now, look at my generation. We're in a hallway with millions of doors. That's a lot of doors.

I often don't answer, but I like receiving them," said one woman, who seemed oblivious to how ridiculous this statement sounded.

If I ever was texting frequently with someone and wanted to make an alias, I think I'd go with "Scottie Pippin." Then my friends who were peeking at my screen could be left wondering why I was texting with the former Chicago Bull star on the reg.

Everyone, including the women who said they were happily married, said they wanted their daughters and granddaughters to approach marriage differently from how they had.

Scheduling chatter is merely one of the many forms of useless banter that makes dating in the digital age so frustrating, especially for women over twenty-five, since they have less patience for constant text exchanges.

Making sure the person shared your interest in sushi and Wes Anderson movies and made you get a boner anytime you touched her hair would seem far too picky. Of course, people did get married because they loved each other, but their expectations about what love would bring were different from those we hold today.

You don't know Jay-Z's scedule. He's a renaissance man.

If someone writes something shitty and you actually address them, most of the time they're just like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm a big fan." And they're really nice people. When you're on the Internet, it's people's first instinct to just go after people.

In recent years behavioral scientists have shed some light on why these waiting techniques can be powerful. Let's first look at the notion that texting back right away makes you less appealing. Psychologists have conducted hundreds of studies in which they reward lab animals in different ways under different conditions. One of the most intriguing findings is that "reward uncertainty" - in which, for instance, animals cannot predict whether pushing a lever will get them food - can dramatically increase their interest in getting a reward, while also enhancing their dopamine levels so that they basically feel coked up.
If a text back from someone is considered a "reward," consider the fact that lab animals who get rewarded for pushing a lever every time will eventually slow down because they know that the next time they want a reward, it will be waiting for them. So basically, if you are the guy or girl who texts back immediately, you are taken for granted and ultimately lower your value as a reward. As a result, the person doesn't feel as much of an urge to text you or, in the case of the lab animal, push the lever.

Today, if you own a smartphone, you're carrying a 24-7 singles bar in your pocket.

For women in this era, it seemed that marriage was the easiest way of acquiring the basic freedoms of adulthood. Things

When I bet on horses, I never lose. Why? I bet on all the horses.

Maybe we are trying to meet every single person in order to be sure we have the best. Maybe we have it all wrong.

Encountering potential partners via online dating profiles reduces three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information,

I prefer being totally sober myself.

When I tour, it's like, well, like a food tour as much as a comedy tour. I try to eat at all the weird places, the obscure barbecue joints, burger places. There are a few spots in L.A. that I'm obsessed with - one of them is the Taco Zone taco truck on Alvarado. There are secret off-menu items that are amazing.

asking a new person to go on a romantic outing has never been easy. It means declaring your attraction to someone and putting yourself out there in a huge way, while risking the brutal possibility of rejection - or, in the modern era, even an unexplained, icy-cold silence.

As we see more and more people online, it can get difficult to remember that behind every text message, OkCupid profile, and Tinder picture there's an actual living, breathing, complex person, just like you.

With stand-up, it's more interesting to hear about people's failures than their successes.

...being asked out through a text message has become so banal that it no longer gives women that sense of flattery.