Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by Patton Oswalt - Page 2

You know, in Los Angeles, you're constantly in your car, you're sealed up, you're not walking around. Whereas in New York, after a while, all your stuff is kind of public, in one way or the other. I'm not saying either one of those is bad; they're both great for a very specific kind of comedian. And I'm glad that they both exist.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I hate all sidekicks.

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.

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.

I have some shorter stories coming out in other books early next year. I might be pitching a re-vamp of Ghost Rider in the spring. We'll see.

Growing up, there are always those kids who are only happy when they are making someone else upset. That is unfortunately just how some people are. And their parents were fine. Some people are just born with bad wiring.

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.

Yeah, there were a few years in the early nineties where I really began to hate what was valued as funny and just sort of what was valued in stand-up, period.

With acting, you see some of the kids are literally just off the street, untrained, and they are great. And others are off the street, untrained, and kind of horrible.

As unhealthy as I am, I'm weirdly aware of exactly how my body functions.

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.

I'm not familiar with the metric system.

I'm going to continue to try to strike a balance, because I really, really do love doing stand-up, and I don't see why it should affect the acting. And again, I'm not going, "I've got to become a dramatic actor now." I just want more interesting jobs. I just want to keep doing stuff that's different.

MySpace is somehow more welcoming than Facebook. And Twittering, I just... Ugh. I like having radio silence. I think radio silence is an important part of any public figure's day. We haven't seen it yet, but there's going to be a generation that comes up where the new trend will be complete anonymity. It'll be cool to have never posted anything online, commented, opened a webpage or a MySpace. I think everyone in the future is going to be allowed to be obscure for 15 minutes. You'll have 15 minutes where no one is watching you, and then you'll be shoved back onto your reality show.

Anything's better than Gen X which is what we got. Thanks Douglas Coupland. We sound like a team of mutant vigalantees with frosted hair and chain wallets. Actually that's not completely horrible.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

Growing up there are always those kids who are only happy when they are making someone else upset. That is unfortunately just how some people are. Some people are just born with bad wiring.

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.

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.

What I was trying to say in that bit, without saying it out loud, is that there were things - you're right, everything is very politicized these days, literally down to what kind of coffee you drink - that I used to fight with people about. And by the way, not just people like Republicans and Christians, but liberal friends of mine and very radical left-wing types, and alternative, indie types.

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

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."

We need conservatives that can accept gays, and then we need hippies that can shave and bathe.

Knowing comedy is knowing human nature.

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

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

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.

What I'm realizing as I get older is that a movie's mainstream success is just as unpredictable as a movie's cult success. Plenty of movies that are truly odd and deserve cults, don't have cults. It's just as much of a crapshoot to be a cult hit as it is to be a mainstream success. Isn't that weird?

It’s the method of consumption, not what’s on the plate.

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.

I really do love doing stand-up, and I don't see why it should affect the acting. And I just want more interesting jobs. I just want to keep doing stuff that's different, rather than saying, "Okay, I've become known for this, and I'll just do this from now on." If I feel like I've done this one thing, I never want to do it again. I want to do something totally different.

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.

Nowadays - and I don't want to make some dopey cultural statement here - everyone can be, just by existing in society, because we all have a ship that we follow. 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.

I love doing movies, but right now, television is the way Hollywood was in the late '60s and early '70s. The dream era I would have loved to have been part of in Hollywood then is happening right now, but it's happening on television, with these big complicated story arcs and real character-driven shows and sheer ambiguity left and right.

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'm so beyond genre, drama, comedies, I just want to do really good, interesting projects.

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

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.

Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you.

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.

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 think most comedians go through that (period), where you have to change or evolve. You don't want to just keep doing variations on the same themes. And, besides, it would look kinda creepy for a guy my age to be doing stuff that, like, a 20-year-old would do. 'Yeah, this is bullshit!' It's, like, 'Really? You don't have bigger concerns at this point in your life?'

If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.

I'm such a bookworm, and I'm such a people-watcher. It took the Internet a while to catch on in Ireland, because the culture there is, you go to the pub and talk to people there, and that's how you get the news and all the gossip. You just do it face to face. And culturally, you just couldn't understand.

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

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 have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn't like that battle. 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. That's why they're okay stand-ups, but they're never going to be great, because they don't have that presence. They never built those muscles up.

The idea of, 'The journey is the destination' is put into action by browsing in an indie record store. Besides, a human being is a much better guide than a 'More Like This' link on the internet.

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

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. And then with MySpace, I just don't read messages. I delete everything, and I just post updates every now and then.