Patton Oswalt Quotes

All the truly great stand-ups say, 'I go onstage, and I work on jokes. The inspiration will happen while I'm doing my work.' To me, in the end, the surest thing is work.

As you get older as a comedian and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.

A lot of nerds aren't aware they're nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, 'I speak Klingon - who am I fooling? You win! I'm just gonna openly like what I like.' Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.

Hobos' (a slang term that combines the words 'hope' and 'bowl of beans given to me for free by a woman who then initiated intercourse')

There are times when I have to take, I call it a 'silence bath,' where I shut off all of the external gadgets. I go walk around, talk to people, and just live life for a while.

Sprocket fiend is the name I have for the subterranean dimension to my film addiction. The subtle, beneath-the-sound-track sound of the clattering projector in those old rep theaters, especially the New Beverly. The defiant, twenty-four-frames-per-second mechanical heartbeat that says, at least for the duration of whatever movie you're watching, the world's time doesn't apply to you. You're safe in whatever chronal flow the director chooses to take you through. Real time, or a span of months or years, or backward and forward through a life. You are given the space of a film to steal time. And the projector is your only clock. And the need for that subtle, clicking sprocket time makes you - made me - a sprocket fiend.

If I were to just focus on stand-up, I could actually, paradoxically enough, be home way more, because I would leave on a Friday, go do a couple theaters Friday, Saturday, maybe Sunday, come home.

Its gaze unlocked a room in my nightmares which should have remained closed.

It's like our country is being run by a bunch of bad alcoholic dads right now.

Roddy the assistant manager lived in the theater. He'd emptied out one of the supply closets. He'd installed an inflatable mattress, a Shower Anywhere portable shower, and a wee television. He slept amid the powdered-butter fumes and empty drink-syrup tanks. He had grub-white skin and Goth circles under his eyes that, unlike those of Goths, came from really, truly existing half in the world of the dead. He smelled like carpeting, Scotch tape, and steak sauce. He was almost forty but had one of those half mustaches that thirteen-year-olds have. He was the closest thing to a zombie I've yet encountered in this world.

The problem is, and I'm just as guilty of this, a lot of people see their follower count increase and mistake that for friendships. It's great to have followers, especially if you want to sell albums, promote shows, or promote your friends, but you still need to get outside and talk to other human beings.

There is a part of my generation that is not on social media because they have happy lives and they're not trying to connect with anybody. And there are other people who are on social media because they need to connect.

Everything we have today that's cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more.

Any acting job that I ever got, I always treated it like I was a neophyte; I didn't know what I was doing, and I was going to work just as hard as I do on my stand-up.

Zombies can't believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits.

Boston. Fucking horrible.
I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."
But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.
But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.
But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.
So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will.

You saw a lot of guys, especially in the early '90s, whose acts were a pitch for a sitcom. A lot of them were very funny, but there's nothing worse than watching comedians or musicians who are up there and are doing something they're not interested in.

Stand-up is something I just truly love to do, so I'll always go back to it. I'll never stop doing it, that's for sure.

Part of being in your twenties is not knowing an ally when you see one.

I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn't like that battle, or they just couldn't do it. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. But they lost those crucial years of learning to turn any audience into your audience.

I have a very tiny house in Burbank. I drive an 8-year-old car. I'm gonna drive it into the ground. I enjoy what I enjoy.

I hate all sidekicks.

The Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation made a bobble head of me and sent it to my management. No card, nothing.

I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.

Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their twenties?

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.

I haven't sworn off Facebook. I'm on Facebook. There's a fan page on Facebook that I will update, but I'm on there myself under a pseudonym, because there were a lot of people able to private-message me on Facebook, and it was getting really weird.

The man is clear in his mind. But his soul is mad.

Having enough money has to go hand in hand with living in a way that you're not being a slave to your possessions.

Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact. That infrastructure might be on fire, yes.

And you'll walk in rolling your eyes and you'll walk out whistling sadly through your teeth because the fuel of the Nerd Mafia is disappointment and exclusion.
- On the Watchmen movie

I love the beginning of Magnolia, the thing about the dealer. That scene is genius. Brilliantly acted.

During the "first Thanksgiving" at Plymouth, Wampanoag Indians - including a Patuxet Indian named Squanto - helped teach Pilgrims how to farm, fish, and hunt and shared the bounty of that first feast. A TRADITION THAT CONTINUES TODAY AND JESUS AND 9/11.

I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.

If you actually do cold readings, it's very close to how people actually talk, because you're experiencing these thoughts anew every moment, and trying to make them come out coherently.

I look pretty nondescript. I don't go out of my way to ... I don't express my personality with my clothes, with my car or my, you know, house. I express with my personality; so as far as what I wear - I don't really care about that.

Knock on wood, my groupies tend to be very artistic, creative people - sometimes way more creative than I am.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, 'Well, I've had it with humanity.' But I was wrong.

I think right now is the best time for stand-up, ever. I sincerely do.

... some of us had built whole careers - pointing out how unfair and whimsical and chaotic the entertainment business was, how it rarely rewarded the truly talented. None of us could see how it never rewarded the inert

The truly great actors, like Charlize Theron, are just like, "I'm an actor. For hire. I show up, I do my job." There's no "I'm just waiting for the inspiration." They just do their jobs. They say, "Let's go over the scene a few times and get it."

I suspected, around the time I graduated college, that we're all versions of targets, fired at by indifferent events. If that was the case, then I wanted to be a moving target.

When you act, you're being asked to pretend in a very rigid, controlled environment. It's very un-childlike. So a lot of times, when you put kids in that situation, you hope they have a better support system outside of what they're doing to bring them back to reality at the end of the day and to keep them well-rounded.

I've gotten very cynical and kind of anhedonic about all the things I have to do to get to do comedy: all the travel, hotels, and airports.

I don't care how high my shrink increases my Lexapro dosage - I WANT TO BE A ROBOT THAT HELPS WOLVES HAVE SEX. Otherwise my parents threw away the money they spent on my college education.

There's no destination. There's no getting anywhere. There's just the going. The key to life is to make the going really fun. Because people that are like, "If I just get to this, then boom!" And then they get there and there's this dawning of an afterwards. Whereas I'm just always in the going. And it's not a frantic going like, "I gotta keep going or I'm gonna go nuts!" I can not do anything for weeks or months if I need to and just sit and read books or watch movies. I'm just as fine consuming and absorbing new art as I am trying to make it. But it's all in the going.

I don't want to get into extended conversations with people on MySpace, because there are friends I have extended conversations with every day.

The apocalypse is coming, that's the one thing I like about George Bush, I really think he can get us into the ... apocalypse, like the BIBLICAL ... I really think he believes that he'll be the guy in the white hat. I think he's read the Stephen King novel The Stand a couple times, and he really thinks there's a dark man in the desert somewhere and he's gonna fight him or something.

Even if it's other people, like on MySpace pages, we're just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we're in.

Here's what I'm afraid of. I know a lot of comedians, friends of mine, who just got into the 'Doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter. They're just gonna laugh anyway.'

He smelled like carpeting, Scotch tape, and steak sauce.

You have to be ruthless with yourself, in terms of being honest about what is working and what is not.

90% of every art form is garbage - dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that's good, suck it up, and drive on.

Somebody is going to find a way digitally that is just as innovative. In the end, the tools can change, but there is always someone who can think of something cool to do.

I visited Surrey in the early fall of 1994, and I would return only if I was tasked to kill a demon to save the world. Maybe not even then. Sorry, Surrey. Sorry, world. Yay, hypothetical demon.

That shit [religion] was going on all over the planet. They would tell them about sky cookies, or sky pie, or sky baklava. And as each of these civilizations grew, they built ships; they'd go visit each other, and the one guy would walk off the boat and go,'Hey, did you hear the good news about the sky baklava?' and the first guy went,'It's CAKE, motherfucker! You're dead!

Knowing comedy is knowing human nature.

I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.

I think the kind of person that gravitates toward New York is a person that's not so much focused on controlling exactly how they appear and how they exit. They're more fascinated with the process.

We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

I've had some pretty good arguments with people, but I've never regretted it. I've had people come up where it's all emotion and no fact. That's always sad.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

I had to go back and reread the page a few times. As I read it, I kept drifting out of the book, out of the booth, and coasting on the green crest of the song, to the momentary idea that any point on Earth was mine for the visiting, that I'd lucked out living in the reality I was in. And I also got the feeling I was souring and damaging that luck by enjoying the contentment of pulling the shades on the sun, and shutting out my fellow employees and the world, and folding myself up in the construct of a brilliant novel like The Man in the High Castle, that all the reading I'd been doing up to this point hadn't enhanced my life, but rather had replaced and delayed it.

I fantasize and idealize myself as Bugs Bunny, but I know deep down I'm Daffy Duck.

My advice to you is be boring, square, asshole parents ... When I have kids, the most recent CD I will own - Phil Collins, No Jacket Required, and I'll rave about it. 'Do you like rock 'n' roll? 'Cause this is rockin' good stuff, kid.'

I grew up in such a featureless, personality-less suburb. There was nothing to push against.

You just do as many shows as you can to hone what it is you're working on.

Is it bad when you refer to all alcohol as "Pain Go Bye-Bye Juice"?

It wasn't until I went to college and met different people from different areas of life - and then went to San Francisco and met people who really knew who the hell they were - that I kind of caught up in a hurry.

Meal isn't over when I'm full. Meal's over when I hate myself.

I update my MySpace every day, I update my Facebook fan page, but that's about the extent of it. I don't want to get into extended conversations with people on MySpace, because there are friends I have extended conversations with every day. I'm on the phone every day. There's like five people I just call and yak with every single day. And that to me is my Internet. You can replace the Internet with five really smart friends.

I like confounding expectations. I can expand what it is I am able to do, and hopefully get to do more weird, interesting projects like this. There's nothing wrong with doing comedies, and I'm not against comedies, either, but I always want to do stuff that keeps me off my guard and gets me out of my comfort zone. And how the audience perceives that ... It's out of my hands. And I don't get that frustrated by it, because I'm on to the next thing at that point.

Even if you're popular, there are times when you just feel like you're not a part of things.

If you hit a midget on the head with a stick, he turns into 40 gold coins.

You can be an amateur and have a passion for something, but it takes a long time to actually become a professional, meaning that you can handle any situation.

This sounds like a brag, but I know how to make good fried rice. I learned in college. There are two secrets - take the rice after you cook it and let it get cold in the fridge. Then cook the egg like you're making a fried egg and just before it's done, dump the rice and veg on it and swirl it around.

I identify [myself] as a stand-up first. Even though lately there's been an explosion of acting on my schedule.

I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything.

I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.

But for the most part, for the majority of a stand-up audience, you better have new stuff they've not heard. And if you put an album out, just consider that material gone. At least that's how I see it.

With a comedian, it's the opposite. You put that album out, and they've heard it. If they're coming out to see you, you'd better be doing new stuff. There's always a tiny part of the audience that want to hear certain bits of yours, or they've brought friends to see you, and they've told them about some of your bits. Then maybe you should do them.

George Bush is not stupid. He's evil. OK? There's a huge difference between stupid and evil.

Take what you need from [films] and get out of the dark once in a while. You're going to have more of the dark than you can handle, sooner than you think. The thing about the dark is it can never get enough of you.

Wars are usually really popular with people that aren't gonna be affected by them. 'Cause it's just entertainment, and it's just weird, like, 'Well, we've got to show the world that we're strong.' No we don't. And by the way, that has nothing to do with you. Why are you equating yourself with that ... you know what I mean?

Every audience is different, even within the same venue. You have to just make every audience your audience; you can't pre-judge an audience based on the size of the room or the type of room. You've just got to be in the moment and go with it.

There's something kind of beautiful about that pure love of things. Like, "I'll show that I love the thing I love by hating everything else."

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

Any comedian who tells you how dark and dangerous they are, they're not dark and dangerous.

I wish I had a really cool, esoteric answer, but what the process is to me is going onstage night after night after night after night until I get a new hour. And then once that hour is solidified and recorded, I move on.

I'm grateful that I had that uphill battle for 10 years of going onstage and having nobody know who I was, because you have to win them over.

I can't say that I ever abided nerd stereotypes: I was never alone or felt outcast.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.