Patton Oswalt Quotes

I'm always trying out new stuff onstage. That's where I do all my writing.

Lot of ugly funny dudes end up with some pretty gorgeous women. Women are much deeper than us in choosing a mate - they see in the long term.

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.

A lot of nerds aren't aware they're nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, 'I speak Klingon - who am I fooling? You win! I'm just gonna openly like what I like.' Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.

I have to drink this much to be as unfunny as you.

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

I'm still very much an atheist, except that I don't necessarily see religion as being a bad thing. So, that's a weird thing that I'm struggling with that seems to be offending both atheists and people that are religious.

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.

We're rewarding either the reality or the appearance of youth, which is why you have all these people in their fifties trying to act like they're seventeen. You know, it's great to be young. Be young. By all means, be young. But always remember that youth is also kinda dumb, and doesn't know a lot yet.

The problem is, and I'm just as guilty of this, a lot of people see their follower count increase and mistake that for friendships. It's great to have followers, especially if you want to sell albums, promote shows, or promote your friends, but you still need to get outside and talk to other human beings.

I've gotten very cynical and kind of anhedonic about all the things I have to do to get to do comedy: all the travel, hotels, and airports.

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

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.

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.

This sounds like a brag, but I know how to make good fried rice. I learned in college. There are two secrets - take the rice after you cook it and let it get cold in the fridge. Then cook the egg like you're making a fried egg and just before it's done, dump the rice and veg on it and swirl it around.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Every audience is different, even within the same venue. You have to just make every audience your audience; you can't pre-judge an audience based on the size of the room or the type of room.

I fantasize and idealize myself as Bugs Bunny, but I know deep down I'm Daffy Duck.

I hate all sidekicks.

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

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.

Knowing comedy is knowing human nature.

I'm not familiar with the metric system.

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 mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.

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?

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

Having enough money has to go hand in hand with living in a way that you're not being a slave to your possessions.

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

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.

One of my groupies gave me a film that they made, and it ended up being amazing, so I got it shown at South by Southwest. If I can help get their stuff out there, then great.

It wasn't until I went to college and met different people from different areas of life - and then went to San Francisco and met people who really knew who the hell they were - that I kind of caught up in a hurry.

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.

It's like our country is being run by a bunch of bad alcoholic dads right now.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.

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

The Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation made a bobble head of me and sent it to my management. No card, nothing.

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.