It's a pretty humiliating thing when you get picked last every day in gym class and then at lunchtime all the kids play sports and you get picked last. At the time I just thought, "This is awful," because it defines you as a weak person. It defines you with girls and if you're bad at sports, you get into this funny cycle where the ball never gets to you because now you're in the worst position, you're in deep right field, so you can never prove that you got better, so the cycle lasts forever.

I always thought it was important to overdeliver, and when I got one of my first jobs, writing jokes for Garry Shandling when he was hosting the Grammys, I stayed up all night and wrote a hundred jokes, and I thought, "I'm always going to be the person that gives them more than they requested, and that's why they'll want to keep me around."

When I was very young, I started to make friends with much, much older people. So when I was twenty, my friends were fifty, and I never really went through forty because I would watch them die and I would feel younger. So you make friends with older people and you will always feel young no matter what.

It's what I always dreamed of: that you can make TV and everyone would get out of your way and you follow your vision without watering it down.

I used to tour a little bit with Jim Carrey and help him out on his first Showtime special.

Humor is his defense mechanism, so that would allow me to talk about some serious subjects, but get a lot of hilarious jokes in.

When Jim Carrey signed on to star in [The Cable Guy], and then they asked me to produce it, I made a very brief plea to direct - which was rejected really as quickly as anything can be.