Judd Apatow Quotes

I always thought that Seth [Rogen] was a fun, caustic, bombastic, sweet, underdog-type of person that I would root for the way you used to root for Bill Murray or John Candy in "Stripes." Seth had something that very few people you encounter have: he had a writer's mind and he had his own comic point of view.

Up until 'Bridesmaids', the general consensus was that women preferred comedy a bit softer.

Everyone is wounded. No one is healthy enough to never screw up, when you're in combat. But, I like to show that, and I like to show how people get back from that. You have to forgive each other. When you're in the middle of a long-term commitment, the essence of it is that everyone is going to have good days and bad days, and it's about how you continue to rejoin forces.

I like to make movies the way people made movies in the '70s, where they lived and died with these stories, and cared about them, and went to war for them, and they all said something they wanted to say.

I think it's fun to have people see everything at once, and then I think certain shows are very well-suited to being on every week and being spread out over months.

I start casting early in the writing process, so I can tailor the script to the gifts of the actors.

I've had movies bomb with terrible reviews, I've had movies make a lot of money with terrible reviews, I've had movies get good reviews and make money. And I like it best when the movies do well and the reviewers like them.

you have to have a dream before you can execute it. That the people who succeed are the ones who think through what the next stages of their careers might be, and then work incredibly hard, day after day, to attain their goals. They don't just flop around like fish. They have a vision, and they work their asses off to make it a reality.

It's funny when people debate about music, because they get so passionate about what they enjoy.

I need to find people who I respect so I can respect them, and they'll like being respected so they'll respect me, and that's like a marriage.

You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making.

Back then, you seemed like a crazy person when you were trying to push the boundaries of network TV. People looked at you, and they were offended by the fact that you didn't follow the generic rules of what was expected on network TV.

Deer are like dogs. Except for Bambi, they're pretty personality-less.

I have to make good things so good comedians want to talk to me.

I try to just save a fresh, clear head for whoever I'm working with, so hopefully it's helpful that there's someone who doesn't have to sit in the editing room for 12 hours a day, and who's blinded by the massive footage and options that they have.

I'm getting older, so how people face grave circumstances is of interest to me. And you meet a lot of people who are very courageous, and it doesn't reek of something funny to write about, but I always think that the higher the stakes, the bigger the laughs can be, and the more emotional the scenes can be.

If the movie's not communicating, it's not working.

You want the audience to get your movie, and you want the audience to like it. It's as simple as that. If they don't understand what you're trying to say, you've failed. Of course, you can't get 100 percent of the crowd to understand the movie, but you know when you've reached the people you want to reach.

If I've learned anything - anything - getting older, it's the value of moment-to-moment enjoyment.

No matter how much you love someone, on a bad day, you could say something terrible. All of the little things that you are saving to say, that you're mad about but never express, sometimes come out, all at once. We all have these terrible moments. That's just part of being human.

I don't really get attached to anything. I'm pretty brutal about cutting stuff. With each successful movie, I've discovered anything that's not connected to the immediate story is going to be cut out of it.

A lot of bands that are great disappear a little bit faster than they used to. They don't get as much support for the long haul. You have to be pretty tough to hang in there.

I remember before I did my HBO special, Chris [Rock] screamed at me - in a loving way, but still. He was like, "You need to do 200 shows in a row and a month straight on the road before you even think about recording a special!" And I had literally booked two weeks on the road and then went right into the recording. It put me in a panic, but it also made me work harder and made me realize that everyone works differently, and that's okay.

As a kid, I was obsessed with the Who. They were the most important band to me. Songs like "I'm One" helped me get through high school.

The hard part about getting much attention is that people start dissecting what you do.

Some stories feel like they need more time or less time to tell. To not obsessively have to trim or add that final two or three minutes is very helpful, because you can just organically follow how the story feels.

The moment you think of a joke is the best moment.

I still feel like a weird kid who is about to take a punch in the face. So, I think it's permanent.

I've come to believe that the simpler the title, the better. Whenever I try to get cute with it, it seems to be a problem but if it's just The 40-Year-Old Virgin, people seem to know what they're in for.

If you watch the arcs of so many comedians, at some point, they just become themselves.

There's nothing more fun than debating and defending your taste in music.

It's funny, now there are so many bands that I can never remember any of their names. Maybe it's because I'm old.

Watching shows on Netflix is a different experience because most people are sitting there for three to five hours. Very few people even watch one episode. So it's not like a movie theater where you want to the movies to be shorter so you can go urinate. You can pause and urinate at home, and if something is longer, you're allowed to stop and eat breakfast and then watch eight more episodes.

At network television you could make a show like Freaks and Geeks, and even though 7 million people watch is every week, you were considered a terrible failure, and they got rid of you and staff. Now ... It's like a world where the replacements are the biggest fans in the world. It's, the Elvis Costellos of television are the winners. Creativity is king and it's very very exciting.

My grandfather was Bob Shad, one of those legendary jazz and blues producers - he worked with Charlie Parker and Dinah Washington, and he produced Janis Joplin's album [1967's Big Brother & the Holding Company]. He always owned small labels as well - he had a label called Mainstream Records in the 70s.

I often say that ... I'm just involved in comedy, so I can be around it.

I'm just trying to be truthful and collaborate with people who have interesting things to say.

I think a lot of studios today are run by women, and we are entering a time when a lot of women have evolved in Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade and wanted to become writers and comedians.

Sometimes you need to get away for a few weeks just to figure out who you are again.

The ones [comedies] that I always liked, whether it's Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, or Fast Times of Ridgemont High, they were all about two hours, or a little bit over two hours. With that extra 15 or 20 minutes, you can get to real character and you're not just stuck in plot.

Nowadays, when kids decide they like an artist, they'll absorb everything that artist has ever done in a single night.

There are only so many hilarious actors so when they cross-pollinate, people assume it's always the same actors and directors.

I have a four-and-a-half-year-old and, when she was two and a half, she would make my wife and I do voices, like Woody and Jessie the Cowgirl, or Elmo, or Yogi Bear and Booboo. If we didn't do it, she would scream at us. So, my wife and I would have adult conversations as Yogi Bear and Booboo. It was just a nightmare year.

Something economically changed. It used to be that you needed 20 million people to watch a TV show for it to be a hit. Now, with just a few million people watching, you're considered very successful, for a lot of these streaming services, or cable channels. Now, that allows people to do much more creatively ambitious work, because it's not lowest common denominator.

Jerry: If you always want less, in words as well as things, you'll do well as a writer.

Well, every movie is an experiment. And the only way you can grow at what you're doing is to take chances. You can't try to stick with what worked last time.

There was definitely a period when I just felt out of sync with earth.

I think the story should always determine the visual approach. There are situations where you want things to feel alive and like life, and there are situations that should have some magic and the separation with the grain.

I had a very specific type of terrible network experience where I was told that people like Seth Rogen and Jason Segel weren't leads, so it truly drove me mad. So to be trusted is all I value.

All my cuts are always about three hours, at the start, mainly because any scene in the movie that's 90 seconds, I probably shot a five-minute version of. If you just extrapolate that through the whole movie, I have a very long version of every scene, usually because, if there's one funny joke, I'll shoot five because I don't know if the one I like is going to work. I'll get back-ups because my biggest fear is to be in previews, testing the movie, and a joke doesn't work, but I have no way to fix it because I have no other line.

I love the Lonely Island. I wish there was more Lonely Island movies.

I didn't want to be a director for hire. It really just took me a long time to learn how to direct and to feel up to the job.

I think a lot of Hollywood is in retreat right now trying to figure out how to make money and make the safest bets.

When people lose their jobs, they can either get another job or be entrepreneurs. In the music industry, a lot of people have attempted the latter by starting their own labels, but in the age of digital downloads, it's very difficult to succeed.

I feel like everybody's waiting for a job y'know, you can make a movie on your phone. And so there really is no reason to worry about how to get in with people- and you can do that, there's a lot to learn working for people -but you can just make a movie, where in the old days that was completely impossible.

To me, I've never understood why there is any question about are women as funny as men.

I love when people work together who know each other very well. Some of my favourite movies are people who are close friends or families.

I feel the responsibility to make things which on some level have something positive to say.

One of my fears is that I'm suddenly not going to be funny, but still think I am. That's like my nightmare that I can wake up in a cold sweat from.

For me, until I know that the audience really gets what I'm trying to communicate I'm not done.

I love Coldplay. I love Steely Dan - Steely Dan's probably one of my top three bands of all time.

In terms of the emotional underpinning, if you've been in relationships, you understand what's happening.

I don't think I'm going to get so mature that I lose touch with the whatever wounded part of myself that feels the need to be funny. I'm already old enough that I realize that's not going to happen.

I used to scream at everybody at the beginning of my career. I'd get really emotional. I'd project all my issues about my parents and safety onto the executives, so every conversation where they gave a note was life or death and you don't love me.

It's so difficult to shock America these days.

I feel like Superbad and Freaks And Geeks are somewhat timeless. That's always gratifying, when you feel like 30 years in the future, people will still get it, and it won't seem creaky. It won't come across like The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

Sometimes, something seems dead, and then out of the blue, someone just figures out the way to fix a script and it goes.

People are disappearing from movies, and normal human behaviour is disappearing from movies ... You are not always fighting a creature in life. That's part of life, it's a pretty big part of life, but it's not all of life.

I think people like Lena Dunham really opened up the door to what was possible, and they've inspired young women to go into filmmaking and writing and directing and acting in a way that maybe they didn't before, because now there is a path and there are jobs.

I like when people are very passionate about what they want to write about. Even if it's silly, you can be very passionate about it.

The great thing about Eminem is, he's just hysterical. You forget, people like Eminem because he is riotously funny. And he's a great actor.

Most people are really fighting to not be adults. And, when it happens, it's a big transition. And a lot of that is just awful. It's awful to have to get a job and really be responsible for other people. And it is funny, too. Like, we're all kind of little idiot kids trying to act like we know what we are doing.

I don't know if you can be a born-again virgin.

I always felt as a kid that I was underappreciated, invisible or weird, but I've always secretly thought people would one day appreciate what is different about me. I'm always putting that message out there.

I'm making a movie about relationships, and I'm surrounded by guys scared of talking to girls.

Just trying to tell the truth about, you know, the struggle of - being alive is funny, it's just inherently tragic and also hilarious - in a fun way and in a sad way. That seems to connect with people.

If we really talked about what's wrong with you, you'd need a 7-1/2-hour movie and nobody would know what category to put it in!

I was a big TV kid.When I was a kid, I would go home at 3:00 and watch TV straight through to the end of Letterman at 1:30 in the morning.I was obsessed with comics.And I would watch Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno and study them as if it was Tolstoy.

When I was very young, I started to make friends with much, much older people. So when I was twenty, my friends were fifty, and I never really went through forty because I would watch them die and I would feel younger. So you make friends with older people and you will always feel young no matter what.

I think that everything I do tends to root for the underdog.

I love magazines and film critics, so I eat it up. I'm not one of those people who says 'I never read anything.' I generally read all of it.

You hear people say: "One day, when I'm in a good position I can make my passion project." I've seen a lot of people get into that position and not make it.

I put on a big show when I write something I think is funny.

I've always appreciated people like Graham Parker or Loudon Wainwright III, who spend their entire lives writing songs and working their asses off just to have complete artistic freedom. They're just sharing their lives with you through their music. That's the same kind of work that I'm trying to do, in my own weird way.

They say certain people aren't good soldiers because if they're in a foxhole all night - you know, if you're creative and smart, you're thinking about all the different ways someone is going to blow your head off. But if you're not that smart, you're just like chilling out. And I feel like that in life. I'm just in the foxhole all fucking day thinking about everything that's going to go wrong in every possible way.

I start thinking about the next movie before it's a success, so I can never have one moment of happiness or peace. I'm instantly thinking about the next one.

Cocky nerds. My wife and I always talk about it. It's people who think they don't think ill of themselves --they actually think that there's something special about themselves but no one's noticed it... And that's what makes them interesting. They have an air of superiority as they're getting pummeled.

A lot of the turning points happen in high school and in college, and it defines a lot of how you see the world and how you decide to defend yourself from the world. Some people - their defense mechanism is, I'm really smart or I'm sexy or I'm the leader. And other people - they hide or they make jokes.

I don't think because a story has humor in it means it's brief. For some reason, people think anything that's 30 minutes is a comedy, comedies can be longer or shorter, so can dramas.

My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it. That's how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive.

If you look at who drives the box office numbers at these films, it's men.

My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up. He loved Lenny [Bruce]. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beatnik-y, you know, for Salt Lake City. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me.

The only way you survive on all these services is if you're groundbreaking. There's pressure to be groundbreaking, which is the greatest thing that's ever happened. It's a bizarre aspect of what's happened with all of these subscription services is everyone is trying to outdo each other by doing great things.

There are people who like short movies, and I think they should just watch our movies on DVD because they can pause, go to the bathroom, eat dinner, and come back to it.