Michael Showalter Quotes

I mean, do you really think Paul Krugman is checking his Twitter account every day to read what I write? Of course not. Every other day maybe, but not every day.

In my perfect world order, it is cold all the time. Everyone wears sweaters and drinks coffee. People don't speak to each other; they read the newspaper. There is no loud music, and cats are in charge.

I tend to a lot of improvisational ranting, and that's fun. For me, stand-up has been, performance-wise, a really good outlet.

Love is such a confusing word. You think I'm joking but I'm not.

I knew that if I was going to write a book, I was going to have to read one, too.

I am a big proponent of writing a great outline. That way you can avoid hitting a roadblock. There is no worse feeling than writing yourself into a corner but if you've figured it all out in the outline then you won't have that problem.

You really have no idea whether or not what you're writing is funny. In stand-up and sketch comedy, you know right away and you can make your changes accordingly.

I think narcissists are endlessly watchable. The way they view the world and the way they interact within the world.

Cats aren't cooperative in the same way that other animals are. You can train a dog to act, but you can't train a cat in the same way.

For me, Twitter works best as a way of taking pictures of being stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. If people really want to read really funny quips about life, parenting, and pop culture, then by all means read Michael Ian Black's tweets.

Given the current state of publishing, I think it helps to have a brand name on the cover of your book. Comedians are proven commodities with built-in audiences. They may not have the writing chops of a Dave Eggers, but they're salacious and funny and self-reflective.

I just made a movie. There's a kind of a banter that some people might recognize as being screwball. There are no cell phones, no DVD playersit's set in a timeless Brooklyn. Hopefully, it's a good, old-fashioned movie.

A lot of my humor centers on the act of telling jokes and I think this can prevent certain audiences from suspending their feeling of disbelief. It might piss a few people off, but I can't help it.

I calculated that if I wrote five pages a day, which seemed very doable, I would have an 1,800-page first draft when the deadline rolled around. Though completely unwritten, I was very impressed with how long my first draft would be.

Many fans don't have the leisure time to track my every word. They're too busy brainstorming solutions to the economic crisis and winning Pulitzers.

One of the things that is always difficult about a collaboration is that you don't necessarily find the same thing funny. And so the challenge becomes, how do you tell the other person that you don't think something's funny? The best collaborations tend to be when you are willing to be told that. But there's also ego involved, and so there's a lot of frustration in knowing that you're writing something, and the other person, on some level, needs to think that it's funny.

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way.

There are comedians that I like. I think a lot of it, you just figure out on your own. It's definitely one of those things that you get good at by doing it a lot. But I like Jim Gaffigan. Patton Oswalt. Janeane Garofalo.