Kumail Nanjiani Quotes

You really need to have that discipline. It's not even discipline. I just put down these rules. It's not like a vague, 'Motivate yourself!' and do something. It's specific hours set aside every day for certain things.

I was on this path to becoming a computer-science guy, but I didn't like it. I got no joy from it. It was very, very scary. It was suffocating to think that I was just going to do this thing for the rest of my life.

The whole religion of Islam is based on reward and punishment and reward and punishment, and it becomes a part of how you think of everything. Even yourself.

I am a very nerdy guy. I understand that it's easier to cast me as a nerdy guy than an action star - although I would love to be an action star!

Just because you saw a vampire doesn't mean that a snowman or a Loch Ness Monster also exists.

I stay home. It's the best place to be alone. There is hardly any walk-through traffic.

I never really got into game shows. The easiest one is 'Wheel Of Fortune' because you just have to know words, and for the most part everyone knows words.

When I started working on 'Michael And Michael,' it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone.

You can get stuck in the trap of reading your YouTube comments all the time. Sometimes I regret it. Not everyone is going to love you. And for some reason, stand-up has this thing where everyone thinks they can do it. So everyone thinks they're an expert.

When generally people make race-based jokes to me - even if they're not technically racist, they're sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever - on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context.

I was extremely shy and had a terrible fear of public speaking. But I had fallen in love with stand-up.

Living in Pakistan, you didn't have a sense of how huge and varied America was, geographically.

I approximated the Black Friday experience at home by hurling myself into a wall a number of times and then ordering online.

I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

We only hear success stories. You don't hear about the hundreds and hundreds - the overwhelming majority that don't go anywhere. This is a more realistic portrayal of what happens in startups.

Wikipedia is kind of weird. I feel it's lame to put up my own page, but I desperately want someone else to do it.

Philosophy is problem-solving. There's a philosophical problem, and then you try to solve it by approaching it from different angles and seeing what way works. That's what comedy is: you have a topic and you try to just hit it as many different ways as you can.

Honestly, I would love to be friends with Fox Mulder on 'The X-Files.' That's almost a little too obvious, but that would be my answer. I'd love to hang out with him.

I'm from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor.

I would say I try to make my comedy really personal. I try to tell stories that happened to me, experiences from my life.

If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

I love constructive criticism. I love getting notes when I'm acting. I love them telling me what to do. I don't always agree with it, but I really need it.