Top 378 Quotes & Sayings by Jim Gaffigan - Page 4

I didn't realize how much of a Hoosier or a Midwesterner I was until I moved to New York. It's weird - growing up in Indiana, I wanted to get out, and now I completely romanticize Indiana. It just seems like there's a greater focus on family back there, which I suppose is something that kind of stayed with me.

Television's very much a writer's medium, as it probably should be, but if you're not the writer, then as the performer, you defer to that. It's just kind of how it's constructed. Is there some leeway? Yeah. But I also don't want to come across as a jerk.

I'm kind of like a guy who's missing a little bit of the guy gene. Like, I love steak, but the notion of golfing is the last thing I would want to do. I love women, but I'm also a mama's boy, and some of my best friends are women. So I'm kinda half guy's guy.

I'd been acting and doing stand-up in New York about eight years, getting rejected, and I finally got the opportunity to do stand-up on Letterman, which holds even more importance for me. With comedians, that's definitely the pinnacle, but being from Indiana, it was a big to-do.

I don't have any delusions. I'm not a novelist - I'm a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it's pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there.

It really never came up, but I think that in present-day America, they're - you know, and I touched on it in the initial clip - is that we are in the middle of this culture war.

I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.

I kind of consider myself... I mean, I try to have my comedy be accessible, and if people are paying $30 to see me in a theater and they want to have their picture taken with me, it's not the end of the world. It's one of those things, where I'm not the only comic who does it. A lot of comics do it. If I'm doing a 4,000-seat venue, it might be a little bit of a different task, but it's all good.

I like bowling. It's just one of those things where I can do so many jokes about it because I do know bowling. Somebody once said, "The whitest things in the world are Jim Gaffigan and bowling."

I had some jokes that were dirty. And some of it is when I started making appearances on Conan and Letterman back in the late '90s, I think. You had to remove the curse words, or you couldn't do some of the more explicit jokes.

I'm a guy who comes from a small town in the Midwest. It's not in my nature to say the most explicit things in public.

Faith is something that's - it's hard to articulate. It's - there's - it's not based on logic.

I believe that comedians do what they do, and then they get credit or criticism for doing it. There's nothing planned about this.

I think when I started doing stand-up, that's when I really tried to question everything in my belief system which is - I think a pretty important part of being a comedian is really questioning things.

I always want my standup act to appeal to everybody in the room, and when I started standup, and I would see people talk about their kids and their wife, and I'd always cringe a little bit, like, 'I can't get a date, I don't know what you're talking about.'

I think what Pope Francis is saying is that nobody's perfect, you know? And so someone like Joe Biden, you know, where - you know, when he was running for president, people were - there were some bishops that were like don't let him have the Eucharist. And Pope Francis is saying that's not the point of this.

I'm not a foodie; I'm an eatie. I don't have anything against foodies. I just don't have the time or the interest to do that much research.

In Indiana, I wasn't anything special. But in New York, I've gone out with girls with purple hair who go out with me because I'm exotic!

The reason I say I'm a horrible person is I don't want myself to be presented as somebody who's a great Catholic.

I do Sierra Mist commercials not because they pay me a lot of money or because it only takes a couple of days. I do it because I have a respect for all sodas and I like to communicate that. Some people say soda, some people say pop, where I'm from in Indiana they called it breakfast.

I grew up in a Catholic family in the Midwest. And I knew people of different faiths and people that were atheists and people that were agnostic.

Thanksgiving is the most complicated meal you can think of. Every night, dinner is just pasta. It's just different shapes of pasta.

I grew up 45 minutes outside of Chicago.

Whatever a writer gets paid for his book, it's never enough. I think that's true. It's hard work. But in the end, you wrote a book. It's something real and tangible that sits on a shelf forever.

I think I grew up with the idea that God was a punishing being, constructed around rules.

I don't want to get involved in the culture war. Religion's iffy.

I think I have a lot of voices in my head and I guess my inner critic is a female.

I don't want to pick a team. I want to make people laugh and hopefully bring some - be humorous about the human experience, you know, whether they're people of any stripes of life.

I do just want to do jokes. I don't want to be a divisive figure.

The idea of being a practicing Catholic, it's - for me, it's like - I need a lot of practice, you know what I mean?

My wife and I, we work together. And we wrote this book, "Dad Is Fat." And in the book, I was encouraged constantly by my editor to be more personal and talk about more personal experiences.

I would say my return to my faith is - it's a very personal thing.

I always had this romantic notion of living in New York. I just felt like, everyone could be different and weird and whatever they are in New York.

If only opening a Vitamin Water could be classified as working out.

I left the Midwest thinking I didn't fit in. But when I got to New York, I realized how truly Midwestern I was.

I kinda expected to turn the bottle and see a recipe. "So that's how you make ice cubes. Apparently you just freeze this stuff. Oh, but you need a tray. That's how they trick you into it."

Boutique hotels are great, but they get too cute. Some hotels have shoe polish. It's like, come on, this isn't 1960. No one's polishing their shoes.

I reached a point in my life where I didn't really like who I was.I was married to an amazing woman. I had children, and yet there was frustration.

I'm not saying that McDonald's gift certificates caused the obesity epidemic, but in retrospect, the timing is kind of suspicious.

I feel guilty if I'm not reading books, but I read scripts of movies or things that I know I'm committed to that I'm going to do the project. I tell myself, "I'm going to read this script like six times," and I only read it the initial time.

I love standup comedians. I really do.

The question is the primary form of communication for little kids.

Even when you hear about a comedian getting married, among comedians, we're always kind of like, what are they doing?

I was still rooting for Notre Dame.It's like there's the cultural Catholic experience.

I've always been somebody that it takes me longer to learn things, but once I learn them... I'm like a quarterback that plays best in the fourth quarter.

I like to stay in a hotel where it's a dome of silence. I can sit in my room and do nothing.

I didn't think that it's something that would happen. I didn't think I would be in the position, emotionally or financially, to be able to do that. But I've been lucky [to have big family].

Who was the first person to walk into a harbor and say, "Whatever that horrible smell is I want to eat it"

The idea of having a large family, I definitely had a romantic notion of it.

Once you identify yourself as believing something, you open yourself to ridicule.

You didn't question - kind of like, you would go to college. You would wear a tie to work. You would, you know, you would work for 40 years. And then you would play golf for three years, and then you would die. That was how I was raised.

I grew up in Sheepshead Bay.

My faith is very personal. It's not something that I want to project on other people.

I do have some Catholic stuff that is done from the perspective of an ignorant Catholic. But other than that, topic-wise, there's nothing really filthy.

I never went to church when I was in college, either.

I think when my mother died, it was such a - you know, a shock to the logic that I had been raised with.

Most of my material is , it doesn't necessarily involve a lot of editing. So even the show with the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, I don't have to worry about some of the material being inappropriate.

I was raised in a family where my father was the first one to go to college.

Ironically, to my children, bedtime is a punishment that violates their basic rights as human beings.

Deep frying a Twinkie makes it healthy, right?