Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Simon Helberg - Page 2

When I decided I wanted to be an actor in high school, I really went into improv. I took classes at The Groundlings. I studied acting. Did sketch comedy in L.A.

I really like 'Project Runway.' I know it's reality, so that might be kind of faux pas for me to say.

There's a lot of closeted nerds out there.

Everyone feels at times like they're missing a page or two out of the handbook that tells you how to live your life.

I would say Mick Jagger plus Mr. Furley equals Howard Wolowitz.

Personally, I'm not into 'Star Trek' or physics or comic books, but I know I might be in the minority.

It's hard to convince your agents and managers to do theater, because it's not as financially rewarding and it takes up a lot of time.

I love Jerry Lewis. I loved Jim Carrey when I was younger, and Mike Myers and Phil Hartman, all the 'Saturday Night Live' people in the late '80s.

My parents tried to convince me that school won't always be there, but auditions will. I said, 'Really? Are they tearing down NYU?'

There are those moments where you realize that your parents or your heroes are human and are fallible. That concept, in and of itself, is something that is dangerous to me, in a good way. It's exciting and scary to meet those people.

Everybody has something now. It's become very over-saturated, and it's hard to weed out what's good, what you should watch and what you have time to watch. And Twitter was much less crowded, at the time, and it was an easier way to reach people. So, the combination of having a great video, a lot more access to people through Twitter, and having Kickstarter be this new thing in. We tapped into it, at its inception, and got people interested in it just based on the concept of what Kickstarter was. The timing was right.

It was like in the film, when I was actually doing a take and wasn't quite sure of the context, and then in the completed film it works beautifully.In the end I didn't know why I felt so shitty doing it, and why it turns out great in the final product. I guess you have to live in that unknown.

Meryl Streep is so brilliant is because she is so human, and aware as a performer.

Im married, so I tend not to hit on every girl.

There are bits at the table read that destroy, so much so that we can't wait to do it in taping. And then, no reaction. And then there are times when I can't get the right read on a line in rehearsal, and then the audience howls at it. The strange thing is I still don't know why it happens like that. It's not like afterwards I think, 'Now I know why that worked!'

It's always nice when someone says that they don't realize it's me on screen, but it would be strange to enter a one story while thinking of another character I do, which is completely different.

Generally people are nice, but it's so weird that it has made me more cautious. Just like anyone else, I like looking around at my environment, but now as I walk down the street I tend to look down.

I met a bunch of people and they said, "We're gonna do a show [Second City]." So we would buy the theater out and do a show, and we did that for five years and we ended up becoming popular. It was before sketch comedy was hipster-time - when you would hand out a flier, people would roll their eyes. Now it's kind of cool.

It's amazing to watch somebody who is kind of this sleazy, degenerate lothario, sex-crazed guy become sort of a romantic, settled-down man about to have a baby.

I always honestly dreamed of coming to Second City in Chicago, although I've never even been there to see a show. But I did a ton of sketch comedy at the Second City in LA, which (at the time, in a different location) wasn't really a theater, it was just a space where you took some classes.

That is what's disconcerting about working on the show, you can't seem to get an instinct about what works and what doesn't. It happens a lot, and in different ways.

I looked at the job of piano accompanist. It's a selfless position and generally they are odd people, according to opera singers I talked to. Just like everybody else, they want more from their life, but now their job is to make others shine.

I came in ["MADtv"] kind of late in the season. Some of the producers didn't want me but the network did. It was all (messed up) from the beginning.

I had to learn all the pieces backward and forward [to play it in "Florence Foster Jenkins"]. We practiced on weekends. It was very much like being in school, except it was with Meryl Streep. Like, I would go to her apartment and we would practice Mozart's "Queen of the Night."

There's no real escape from the work, but in some ways, if you're as obsessive as I am, it's a sweet little thing we've figured out. You bring your work home and you work 24 hours a day, but it's good.

To me the ambiguity is, maybe our perception of ourselves is always going to be different than somebody else's perception. There will always be that disparity.

It's not really about confidence. It's just something that isn't really in the vocabulary of what goes on at work. The writers write and the actors act.

I was young. I was 23 or 24. I just wasn't a fan of the politics of campaigning - of going into that environment and competing and trying to get into the good graces of the writers.

I wanted to move on. I wanted to do acting. The next thing I did after [MADtv] was a good hybrid of that. I did this show with Bob Odenkirk and Derek Waters (creator of Comedy Central's "Drunk History") and it was a little homegrown thing that we shot and then we sold it to HBO. We made a pilot and HBO didn't pick it up, but then we made all these webisodes. This was before streaming stuff online made any sense. (The episodes are available on YouTube). Nobody even knew how to watch things on the internet.

When you have this long of a run [in The Big Bang Theory], you don't have to have something happen every episode. Like, Sheldon lost his virginity last season and in the first season he didn't even like girls. So I feel like you can earn that stuff. And that is really fun, because you get to find new layers. It's a testament to the writing.

I don't mind being recognized, it's just that I have a bit of social anxiety, and this situation has increased it. The idea of having to be 'on' and social at random times can be difficult. I'll be out in the morning, someone comes and takes a picture, and then I discover I have toothpaste on my face.

There's also these moments when you're like, oh, I really want to do different things. Not instead of this show [The Big Bang Theory]. It's just a hunger to do something else, too.

What I wanted to do was music, until I was about 16. But it was jazz and rock, never classical music.

I was like, I can't believe I get to be in a scene with Meryl Streep [in Florence Foster Jenkins]! And then I was like, but why do I have to play Chopin? It's already going to be intimidating.

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger. Maybe we don't all have that dream. I don't know. Getting to role play or step back to a different moment in time and see things through a different lens is something that resonated with me, for sure. We don't get to do that, generally, but when the right neurological disorder lines up with the right unstable woman, that moment presents itself. Getting to know where we come from is a really profound way of getting to look at who we are.

I did not want to be the accompanist to an operatic star. But I was at a very high level for a 16-year-old, and I maintained that. So really good, but more impressive than classically trained. So I had to take a crash course in classical technique because I really wanted to get away with playing this character [in Florence Foster Jenkins] without people saying, "That's not really accurate."

I wanted to come to Chicago. I also wanted to do "Saturday Night Live." And then I got to a place where I didn't want to do those things anymore.For the sketch comedy thing, I got cast on "MADtv," and that will kill any man's desire to do comedy.

The weird part is actually, there were so many exceptionally talented people there [ on "MADtv"]. But it was a disaster. I don't think I enjoyed any of it, really. I had a different sensibility.