Top 107 Quotes & Sayings by Ed Helms

You take a vacation to a place like Thailand and you're ready for the excitement of something new and foreign. But when you're working 14-hour days, all you want is something familiar to ground you. And there's just nothing there.

I like being from a city that is not entrenched in show business. When you're in New York City or Los Angeles, even if you're not dealing with show business, there's still this sense that it's the center of the universe.

When you're in New York City or Los Angeles, even if you're not dealing with show business, there's still this sense that it's the center of the universe. And I think that's a really dangerous, limiting mindset.

First there was the New Hampshire primary, and we had nearly a year leading up to it. And now, look! Three primaries in one weekend! How many of these things are they going to have?

I'm kind of embarrassed by how quickly I adjusted to L.A. I really love it. It's so pleasant.

Vulnerability is huge. I love to see that in characters. It's something I feel like a lot of my comedic heroes have always done.

When you're playing a fictional character reacting to the real world, it's incredibly difficult and confusing and kind of messes with your values a bit.

This may come as a surprise, given the nature of my job, but I am very guarded and contemplative. I'm not a naturally boisterous person.

I feel like I'm worried about my later years in life because I feel like I'm using up so much good karma right now. There's going to be some sort of karmic backlash somewhere down the road.

I try to explain to people that you get the roles that are right when they're right. If you have a nerd character but you're kind of a cool guy, you're probably not going to get the nerd part. The nerd is going to get the nerd part. You know, someone like me.

My friend and I sang an a cappella rendition of Extreme's 'More Than Words' at one of our football pep rallies in a desperate attempt to look cool. For a while, I wore pink Converse All Stars because I thought it made me seem daring and irreverent.

I'm a very jaded and cynical person.

I happen to think singing is hilarious, especially when it pops out at the wrong time.

April is tax month. If you are having trouble filing your taxes, then you should hire an accountant. They'll give you the same advice that they've given hundreds of corporations - taxes are for douche bags.

I had envisioned doing comedy since childhood. For sure.

It's incredibly fun to play someone that you don't like. It exorcises your own demons in a way. It's cathartic. We all have things that we don't like about ourselves, little things. And I get to amplify those things and put them out there. It's fun and it has a cleansing effect.

I love travel. I love to go spend time in new places. And even though I got horribly sick in Thailand, and it was the sickest I may have ever been in my life, I still loved the trip.

We played around and improvised a ton [in The Hangover], and I think it's hard to say at this point what's what. Gosh, I wouldn't even know how to take a stab at it. The script was so good that we really didn't need to improvise very much, but I think we just found a lot of moments on the set. It's really cool when you get onto the set of a movie and you start shooting the scenes and you start to actually incorporate the environment.

[I read news] because no one's going to tell me what they really think of something.

It has been said that a rolling stone gathers no moss. I would add that sometimes a rolling stone also gathers no verifiable facts or even the tiniest morsels of journalistic integrity.

I think the culture of Civil War re-enacting is also incredibly fascinating.

Don't be afraid of fear. Because it sharpens you, it challenges you, it makes you stronger; and when you run away from fear, you also run away from the opportunity to be your best possible self.

I'm sure I cause just as much consternation for editors as any other actor, but it definitely makes me feel more comfortable understanding how and why all the different camera setups exist.

Who among us wouldn't rush out and buy a Pepsi if we thought it would make the Osborne's disappear?

I was just fooling around with the piano and Todd [Phillips] was like, 'Hey there's a great spot in the movie [The Hangover] where we need a little bit of a breath in the narrative. You should write a song and stick it in there.' And I was like, 'Well, what should the song be about?' And he said, 'The tiger.' 'Oh, okay.' So I went off and I wrote this song. I came back and Todd and I tinkered with it a little more and then we shot it right then. It all happened in a day.

I've been to Indonesia, but I've never been to Thailand. I hear the people are lovely, the food is delicious, and that the heat and humidity are lethal.

It's a very collaborative environment [making The Office]. We always do takes of how it's scripted, but then we also mix it up a lot too. And it's kind of a crapshoot, you never know which one... I mean a lot of time improvisation doesn't go anywhere and it's not good at all but, so what was written is often times better.

This word gets overused in describing actors but I think it applies to Mike [Tyson] in this case - he was totally fearless. He jumped in and played with us comedically and improvised a lot. A lot of jokes in those scenes with him are from him improvising.

There are certain relationships in our lives that implode, and it can feel really inexplicable and terrifying. You don't know why, and sometimes relationships end for reasons that one person keeps from the other person, and it's just totally unclear, and it just goes south and it's heartbreaking.

With the tiger you're always on edge, and you always have to keep your distance. The monkey is far less threatening so you're more relaxed around the monkey, and I think that's actually hazardous.

They [Mike Tyson and Todd Phillips] actually struck up a really pretty incredible chemistry, those two, and I think they really trusted each other.

As a hobbyist, there's something about miniature anything that captures my imagination.

I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

I mean they [ Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis] are both just really good guys and also they're both extremely funny in very unique ways. We made each other laugh an awful lot, and that goes a long way. And we also went through some hard times. I mean it was hard to make this movie [The Hangover].

I think that music at inappropriate times with inappropriate volumes can be the funniest thing ever.

I found myself often asking the question, "Who deserves to be made fun of?" Depending on your mood, the answer can be no one or everyone. It took me a while to understand the math of how those field pieces came together. I don't think that ridicule is ever funny, but there are times when that gets the biggest response.

I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.

You make adjustments according to the specifics of the character.It's something I feel like a lot of my comedic heroes have always done. It's not even necessarily vulnerability, always, but it's an earnestness, a genuine desire to actually do the right thing, but then still make really misguided, stupid decisions along the way.

All I knew is that I loved movies and comedy and TV, and I wanted to perform. I made a bunch of shorts and movies in college, and that was always fun too. I directed some plays in college. It was taking it all in and trying to immerse myself in as much of it as possible.

I'm working on a script right about Civil War re-enactors who go back in time to the actual Civil War. It's kind of a big, crazy Back to the Future comedy. So, of course, it's the Civil War - I play the banjo. I was just having a conversation with one of the producers about some of the material and he was like, 'You know, we have to work in a scene where you play the banjo. And I was like I'll get behind that.

It's incredible how big a part of my acting career music has become. I get asked about it all the time, and I love it. It's one of my favorite things, and I'm so glad that I get to sort of work that in.

[Mike Tyson] was fantastic. Well, here's the cool thing about Tyson. It turns out he's a huge fan of Old School, which was one of Todd Phillips' earlier movies. So he got to the set and he already liked Todd and he trusted Todd.

I mean the fun part about when Andy Bernard sings on The Office is he usually embellishes the songs in fun, stupid ways. That's just something that I do in life, like in the shower or whatever. So a lot of that stuff is pretty spontaneous.

Improvisation is about finding the best joke or the silliest way to get something across. Improvising conflict is always fun because you can just go for it.

I cannot stress this enough - if you try to install an HDTV in a non-HDTV compatible house, you may tear the space-time continuum.

The piano song that I do in the movie [The Hangover], it's a great example, that was never - that wasn't in the script.

I grew up in Georgia and I think if you're raised in the South it's where a lot of the war was fought, and it's just more present in the sort of psyche of the South. So I've always just been interested and sort of fascinated by [Civil War].

Probably my favorite thing about watching a movie that I'm in the first time is to see all the things I didn't know were happening in a scene around me.

When you try hard at everything you do, even when it feels foolish to do so, you’re opening up doors and possibilities you might not be seeing in the moment.

Chickens are a symbol of chaos. Wherever you stick a chicken, unless it's a chicken farm, it's just chaos.

I worked as an assistant editor, actually, for a few years. That was right when I was just starting to get out at night and do a lot of stand-up, improv, and sketch work in New York. It really is invaluable. I think it pounded into me an awareness of what an editor wants and needs, in terms of clarity of a moment, where and when to start and stop a line.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting that, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want. And also, the problems editors run into when trying to edit performances - it helps me head that off at the pass a little.

Todd [Phillips] doesn't care. That's part of his genius as a director, he will say anything to anybody.

One of the biggest breaks we had actually, one of the biggest, the hardest I laughed on the movie [The Hangover] was the baby was just doing ridiculous things and making hilarious faces. But I'm sitting there and I'm supposed to be having this exchange with Zach [ Galifianakis] and the baby is like staring at me with these huge eyes and acting, and just making the most cerebral faces, and I could not keep it together.

People now genuinely respond to it and associate me with music. It's really fun.

I went to Oberlin College, and they don't have a film major, but they do have what's called an individual major, where you can sort of pitch to a committee your own course study, and if they approve it, you have essentially just designed your own major. So Oberlin doesn't have a film major; they do have a film minor... And then my spring semester of my junior year, I went off to NYU film school as a visiting student - they have a program for kids from other schools to come in for a semester.

Getting any movie made is just like trying to push a giant boulder up a mountain, and there's so many moving parts. Obviously, there's the creative side, and then there's the logistical side, and they're both colossal.

So long as your desire to explore is greater than your desire to not screw up, you're on the right track.

There is something beautiful in the mundane if you take enough microscope to it and focus in on something that seems innocuous to begin with.

I have profound respect for Sacha Baron Cohen, but Borat is not a particularly comfortable movie for me to sit through.