Mike Birbiglia Quotes

I think serious situations actually make for the best kind of belly laughs. But theyre also the hardest to convert into comedy at the outset.

I find my fans are really funny people. Most comedians can't say that about their fans.

I'm a compulsive everything.

Does anyone know a word that rhymes with shark?

Sometimes, when you want to be in a place so badly, you'll do anything.

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

I feel like people have more in common than the news reports.

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

Backup dancers are completely respectable. They're the studio musicians of dance.

I like 'Donnie Darko;' it's a cool take on dreams and sleep.

The people who are the worst at news, who kind of engage in what I call the World Wrestling of news, have kind of set the bar for where news is.

How many people do you know who have thrown up on the Scrambler or a carnival ride? A lot of people, is the answer.

I almost can't even put to words how happy I am that I got married.

I shouldn't say bad things about the illiterate, though..I should write it. That way they won't find out.

I figured out in my thirties it was about 'what can I contribute'? And what I figured out about that is creating something from scratch, and connecting it to people.

I have this habit of asking 'why do you want to do it?' and then interrupting them to say, 'here's why you want to do it.' Because it's in the 'yes...and' spirit [rule of improvisation].

I was an altar boy as a kid. And the answer is no.

When I made 'Sleepwalk with Me,' many people asked me if was a novelty thing, a one-off. But this is the goal, I'm just hitting it 12 years after I thought I would.

The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short.

I don't smoke a lot of pot anymore. No one wants to hang around a guy who ends every sentence with, "Do you guys hate me?"

My family isn't really Italian. We're more like Olive Garden Italian.

A girl offered me E at the club. 'Have you ever done E?' 'I watch E.'

I didn't realize how good I was with technology until I met my parents... my dad told me "You're good; you should be a computer programmer." I said, "You're bad... you should be a caveman."

The key is to do what you love.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

I got an E-Trade account. Turns out I can turn $1,000 into $420 in less than a week. Sure, I had to pay some fees.

I can always go back to waiting tables, but I won't be very good at it. I'll never be good at it.

I couldn't recommend more that people put themselves in a situation where they can see a lot of work that they admire, and for free.

In our culture right now, I want to take on this notion of what a singular success means. We think success is one thing, but it's actually a spectrum of where our life takes us.

You can express love by calling out the truth out of the situation as opposed to dancing around it.

Fortunately, I don't talk about politics on stage.

Comedy unites, it doesn't divide!

All techniques of comedy are valid and interesting to me.

I struggled with that notion early in my career. 'I know this is funny but nobody is laughing.' This thought occurred for years.

I think sometimes you don't understand how to convey an idea, depending on the moment you're living in.

I think the cleverness is inadvertent.

I think Mitch Hedberg is one of the great comedians of the past 20 years.

Success is fleeting. It may not have to do with you but how your work is received.

Gillian [Jacobs] is brilliant, and it was Lena Dunham that recommended her. I didn't see her in the part, but Lena told me that Gillian can do anything. It turned out to be true.

Life is unfair and improv is a great metaphor of that.

My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Starbucks is the last public space with chairs. It's a shower for homeless people. And it's a place you can write all day. The baristas don't glare at you. They don't even look at you.

You can't go to medical school and come out and be like, 'I'm going to be a dog catcher.' That would be so pointless.

I'm generally so disoriented during the week about what I'm doing and where I am - I travel a lot - that when I'm home on a Sunday, I typically try to sleep in as much as I can.

I like 'Donnie Darko' it's a cool take on dreams and sleep.

They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.

I love pizza. I want to marry it, but it would just be to eat her family at the wedding.