Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by Patton Oswalt - Page 3

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

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 would always rather shoot for something unique and fail than do a script because I feel like they're hitting all the right mainstream beats.

People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald's hash brown if it's all they've got.

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 really had to imagine the kind of person that I would have been if I had never left my hometown... I don't think I would have been a very pleasant person.

Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, This is where I wanna be.

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

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.'

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.

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."

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.

Just think of yourself as starting from zero every time. That's what I do with every new role. I'm at zero, and I'm going to do the work.

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.

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.

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.

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 thatArray; you know what I mean?

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.

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.