“Part of forging a healthy relationship with people you don’t see all the time sometimes involves asking questions that you don’t really need the answers to and letting someone think they are helping you when you don’t really need their help at all.” – pg. 55
“A person can get away with anything if they’re dressed well and act like they belong, even when they don’t. This is an important thing to know if you live in a place like New York City.” – pg. 95
“When I think about history – what I’ve learned, how I’ve learned, when in my life I’ve been ready to learn – it’s always connected to music.” – pg. 9
“Most important, don’t let this be your last book. Get a stack going on the table next to your bed, and another stack going on the counter in your kitchen. Always have something within arm’s reach that makes you consider and reconsider, agree and disagree, follow someone else’s train of thought and then switch it onto your own track.” – pg. 14
“The farther away an event gets, the more we can potentially know about it – the more we’ve been able to read about it, think about it, process various theories about it.” – pg. 19
“You can tell something’s missing when you see people trying to find it.” – pg. 42
“Fiction can sometimes be true.” – pg. 92
“We’re reductive so that we can be constructive. […] Extremely complicated situations are simplified so they can be communicated to others.” – pg. 99
“History should matter to all of us at all times, because we’re all in it.” – pg. 123
“Should you shut your eyes to the most painful parts? Should you narrow your gaze only to what concerns you and those close to you? Or should you open your eyes wide, take it all in, and then seek out pleasure, comfort, and joy despite what you have just taken in? Should you decide things don’t matter or should you practice mind over matter? Prince counsels the latter: […] If I gotta die, I’m gonna listen.” – pg. 139
“I was also, for the first time, an adult. A young one, certainly, but a person with a vision of what kind of world I might want to live in and what I thought it might be able to give me (and, less important at first, what I might be able to give it.)” – pg. 210
“When you find yourself at the crossroads of history, look in all directions.” – pg. 237
“I had come in ready to make history by remaking History, but I had run into an event.” – pg. 311
“The majority of people live only for the past.” – pg. 319
“No matter how small the scale, no matter how fine the grain, there’s simply no way to recover the past in all its richness and contradiction.” – pg. 320
“That’s the excitement of it, or the terror. It’s like walking into a room without any real sense of what’s in there. Later they’ll come and take pictures of the room, and they’ll figure out what happened here. But I gotta go.” – pg. 321
“No one will lie to you more than you will lie to yourself.” – pg. 18
“Remember that everyone is annoying.” – pg. 24
“Why do we keep giving these people so many chances? It’s not because they’re sophisticated narcissists who could teach a master class in manipulation. […] That’s not the reason – it’s often because our egos want to feel special and validated.” – pg. 31
“It shouldn’t matter how focused they are on their career right now. […] If they’re excited about you, they will focus on you.” – pg. 41
“Everyone is a fuckboy until they meet someone they’re willing to make sacrifices for.” – pg. 44
“To get something you want, you must be willing to lose something.” – pg. 90
“Never completely close any doors to the rooms you eventually hope to fill.” – pg. 123
“Being in love, no matter how slow or fast you feel it, doesn’t mean you stop learning about each other.” – pg. 140
“Heartbreak doesn’t kill you, it just feels like it will for a while.” – pg. 152
“Hope when you are single. Hope when you have a broken heart.” – pg. 167
“So many people dealing with Heartbreak will wonder how long it’s going to take before they are healed. […] What makes heartbreak harder to get over is making the mistake of telling ourselves it’s not.” – pg. 185
“If you want to put a positive spin on it, the fact that this relationship was meaningful is why you shouldn’t reach out.” – pg. 190
“When all else fails, watch your version of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” – pg. 192
“Don’t convince yourself you actually loved the thing you lost more than you did when you had it.” – pg. 202
“It’s also nice to feel good at something. Even if that thing makes you very uncomfortable at times. Even if that thing puts a lot of pressure on you. Even if that thing is very stressful. Sometimes it’s just nice to feel good at something.” – pg. 68
“Fun isn’t a thing I’m particularly familiar with. Life’s a serious thing. There’s a lot going on in this place.” – pg. 82
“Through writing, I feel power for maybe the first time in my life. I don’t have to say somebody else’s words. I can write my own.” – pg. 85
“Writing is the opposite of performing to me. Performing feels inherently fake. Writing feels inherently real.” – pg. 86
“I disdain the part of me that’s romantic. I’m embarrassed by it.” – pg. 111
“I’m shocked by how many people think they’re original and say the same thing.” – pg. 120
“I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with. Because once the context ends, so does the friendship.” – pg. 166
“I’m allowed to hate someone else’s dream, even if it’s my reality.” – pg. 220
“I want to do good work. I want to do work I’m proud of. This matters to me on a deep, inherent level. I want to make a difference, or at least feel like I’m making a difference through my work. Without that feeling, that connection, the work feels pointless and vapid. I feel pointless and vapid.” – pg. 226
“I like that I’m able to get myself on paper. It simplifies things for me.” – pg. 274
“The people I was close to seemed like friends for life, people I could never imagine not seeing every day. But life happens. Love happens. Loss happens. Change and growth happen at different paces for different people, and sometimes the paces just don’t line up. It’s devastating if I think too much about it, so I usually don’t.” – pg. 300
“The paradox of being busy writing is that so much of writing feels dangerously similar to doing nothing. I stir and stare and, usually, […] sink into a low-grade (but sometimes high-grade) depression.” – pg. 2
“Homesickness isn’t about houses; it’s about that elusive sense of something else.” – pg. 76
“Most of our own dreams are so dull that we forget them ourselves.” – pg. 111
“All I want in life is for no one to be lonely.” – pg. 121
“Sometimes we are too close. Sometimes our creativity, our relationship, our book, our project, thing thing we are working so hard on, needs space from us. […] The truth is, there will be times where you actually must step away from what you love in order to love it right, when your absence might be more helpful than your presence.” – pg. 166
“You could be the funniest guy in the room just by describing some of the stuff Chris did.” – pg. xii
“Chris didn’t really tell jokes. It was just who he was. He just was funny, being himself.” – Nick Burrows, pg. 23
“When Chris was sorry, he was genuinely sorry. […] and he would always take his punishment. He knew it was the price to pay for getting the laugh. But before that apology would come, he had to get a laugh and you had to admit that it was funny.” – pg. 25
“If he made somebody’s day better, if he could ease the pain and sadness in the world just a bit, that was why he felt he was here.” – Pat Finn, pg. 40
“Keith Richards said that the first time he heard rock and roll it was like the whole world went from black and white to Technicolor. That’s how Chris always seemed to describe finding comedy.” – Brian Stack, pg. 40
“He could do the same thing fifty times and somehow always make it funny. […] You could videotape it and analyze it with a computer, like you would a golf swing, but you still wouldn’t understand it, and you could never hope to replicate it.” – Brian Stack, pg. 59
“[He] tore too quickly through life, leaving a wake of laughter behind him.” – Tom Schiller, pg. 145
“Even ranked against all the fame and money and stardom, he felt the days back at Edgewood were the best days of our lives.” – pg. 153
“What’s hard for a comedian is that they make a living on their anxieties and their self-doubts, but in real life they try and separate themselves from that. Chris didn’t do that. He was absolutely honest in what he was.” – Norm MacDonald, pg. 156
“One gift he had was the ability to make people laugh. The other gift he had was himself. Just being the person he was was a gift for others.” – Joe Kelly, pg. 169
“The guys from SNL all tell me that everyone felt Chris was the funniest guy. So for Dave [Spade] to be the one to crack Chris up, well, that was like being the one to pluck the thorn from the lion’s paw. He had a friend for life.” – Peter Segal, pg. 180
“It was just one of those rare things that happens in movies sometimes. It all came together.” – Michael Ewing on Tommy Boy, pg. 189
“Comedy people, when we’re alone and insulated, just get more and more shocking, and it doesn’t play to the rest of the world.” – Michael Shoemaker, pg. 199
“One time the florist messed up and sent me plain red roses. He was so upset he called and bitched them out. He just hated to be typical. He wanted there to be thought behind everything he did.” – Lorri Bagley, pg. 208
“If you want to know something about a guy, go play golf with him.” – Bruce McGill, pg. 221
“But there is this impulse that comedians have to do serious work.” – Brian Dennehy, pg. 270
“The real challenge of art is to understand more about yourself.” – Brian Dennehy, pg. 270
“Being with Chris reminded you that there was a time when you could still believe in all the things he believed in. It reminded you of a time when you were lucky enough to look at the world through honest eyes.” – Dan Healy, pg. 325
“[Dan Aykroyd] spoke of Chris taking his God-given talent and turning it back out into the world to try and make it a better place.” – pg. 330
“I never wrote things down to remember; I always wrote things down so I could forget.” – pg. 5
“I’ve always gotten away with more in life than in my dreams.” – pg. 10
“In time, yesterday’s red light leads us to a greenlight.” – pg. 14
“The first step that leads to our identity in life is usually not I know who I am, but rather I know who I’m not.” – pg. 64
“On my own in this uncomfortable world, I took responsibility for who I was and what I believed in.” – pg. 77
“I carved these words into a tree: less impressed, more involved. The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us – the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things – the sooner we get better at them.” – pg. 113
“Sometimes we don’t need advice. Sometimes we just need to hear we’re not the only one.” – pg. 149
“Sometimes we have to leave what we know to find out what we know.” – pg. 156
“It’s not about win or lose, it is about do you accept the challenge.” – Issa, pg. 208
“Yes by saying no. […] I had un-branded.” – pg. 260
“I found myself right where I left me.” – pg. 286
“When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze. When you’re stuck in the storm, pray for luck and make the best of it.” – pg. 289
“The stories weren’t joke driven. The comedy focused on human behavior.” – Ken Kwapis, pg. 5
“So many shows are about somebody trying to better themselves or they have some big goal they’re trying to achieve, and that’s not what life is about for most people.” – Clark Duke, pg. 5
“The great, great, great sitcoms of yore all had a simple premise. It’s character driven. Taxi‘s just a fucking taxi place. Cheers is just a bar. That’s all it is. And we were an office.” – Oscar Nunez, pg. 5
“But there were paper companies, obviously. That became interesting to us. It’s something everyone uses, but you never really think about the manufacture or the sale of it. It’s just something everyone has. There’s also something just about the blankness of it, and the anonymity of it.” – Stephen Merchant, pg. 17
“There’s that juxtaposition between how you see yourself and how other people see you. That was a big one for me. It was all about that blind spot.” – Ricky Gervais, pg. 18
“I’ve got the attention span of a toddler and I want to do the next thing while I’m doing this thing. The only thing that gives me an adrenaline rush is an idea.” – Ricky Gervais, pg. 23
“It was him just trying to understand the psychology of the characters so he could build the American equivalent, really.” – Stephen Merchant, pg. 27
“Jim is turned slightly away from Pam, so that it takes… this sounds very small, but it’s important… he has to make a choice to turn and look at her.” – Ken Kwapis, pg. 54
“You have to leave a lot of good stuff on the floor.” – Greg Daniels, pg. 75
“We’re going to get up every day, and we’re going to have fun, and we’re going to be funny, and we’re going to make people laugh, and we’re just going to keep doing our jobs.” – Teri Weinberg, pg. 84
“I think the greatest comedy comes from people taking themselves seriously. The circumstances can be absolutely absurd, but if the person is taking the stakes really seriously and taking themselves really seriously, it really is a great comedy mine to dig from.” – Rainn Wilson, pg. 88
“If a person comes in that can do something really well and it’s not quite what you had in mind, you should take them, because they’re going to make the character their own.” – Mark Proksch, pg. 90
“When the character needs love you can play that a little differently than when the character just needs attention.” – Larry Wilmore, pg. 93
“That note from Greg saying ‘Michael’s gotta have heart’ changed it so much. It became ‘Michael wants us to be a family.’ And that’s the core of the show.” – Jason Kessler, pg. 96
“It’s a love story disguised as a workplace comedy.” – Larry Wilmore, pg. 96
“It was all about the framework – that’s a Greg thing: It can’t just be crazy.” – Mindy Kaling, pg. 109
“A national trinket? I can live with that, but I can’t live with a national treasure.” – Creed Bratton, pg. 125
“It’s incredibly fun to play someone that you don’t like. It exorcises your own demons in a way. It’s cathartic.” – Ed Helms, pg. 138
“All the audience wants is for them to be together and have a happy ending, and that is just the death of storytelling.” – Caroline Williams, pg. 143
“The show mixed melancholy and joy in the same space. It’s hard to do, but when it works it’s very special.” Lee Eisenberg, pg. 145
“I remember in season three when Greg Daniels came up to me and started talking about Abbott and Costello. He said, ‘Costello was the funny one, but they paid Abbott more. That’s because it was much harder to find a good straight man to set up the jokes than it was to find the silly guy.’ […] He was basically saying that I was very valuable to the comedy of the show.” – Melora Hardin, pg. 146
“Loneliness is, at least for me, the most universal emotion.” – Caroline Williams, pg. 155
“John was the everyday man of the show. He was the one that was saying, ‘Do you see what I have to deal with every day at work?'” – Matt Sohn, pg. 167
“It can be incredibly frustrating when you’re working on a story and you feel like there’s a story there, but you just don’t have it yet. And then when you have it, there’s just no better feeling.” – Jen Celotta, pg. 205
“There’s story everywhere, it’s just about finding it. When you’re a newer writer it is all about getting out of your own way in order for it to be there. If you’ve set it up, and you have interesting characters, and interesting situations, you will find the story.” – Jen Celotta, pg. 207
“It’s just real. It’s funny, but it never tries to be surreal.” – Brent Forrester, pg. 225
“He was always trying to capture something that’s real about who people are and how they live and feel and love and want and mourn.” – Jeff Blitz, pg. 225
“You’re paying me for the day, you’re giving me a nice comfy trailer, I’ve got a book, and I’m happy.” – Randy Cordray on Kathy Bates, pg. 287
“That’s always the goal, by the way. Even though it’s a comedy, you always want to make people feel. That’s the highest compliment you can get, is to make someone feel something.” – Claire Scanlon, pg. 299
“I think the episode encompasses pretty well what was going on in real life in terms of leaving a workplace that had become pretty much a family and choosing to move on to other things.” – Brian Baumgartner, pg. 331
“‘We are retiring your number on the call sheet. It will never be used by anyone other than Steve Carrell from this day forward on the office. […] From now on until the day you return, all of our call sheets will begin with number two.’ And that had never been done as far as I know in the history of Hollywood.” – Randy Cordray, pg. 336
“People can’t help but change when they have that kind of success.” – Karly Rothenberg, pg. 369
“I think you leave the dance with the date that brought you.” – Owen Ellickson, pg. 374
“I think the simple explanation is that the characters may be exaggerated, but they’re all people you know.” – Briton W. Erwin, pg. 405
“The more realistic a show is, the more you have a chance of emoting and feeling something deep and real.” – Brent Forrester, pg. 408
“It’s never too late in life to find success if you work hard enough.” – Andy Greene, pg. 422
“Because who knows: […] the worst year of your life could turn out to be the best year of your life.” – pg. 45
“I could stay in really well because I went out really well.” – pg. 61
“I miss all the things I never thought I’d have to miss.” – pg. 89
“I keep feeling as if suddenly my own life is not as random but is full of all these connections and coincidences.” – pg. 91
“There is a person out there who has loved me more than anyone and I’ve loved him more than anyone. But he is just a person out there. And that’s how our story has to end.” – pg. 151
“I don’t want to ever be stuck in that very sad trap of thinking your happiness lives in your memories.” – pg. 209
“It makes me feel like time is still linear and the math is linear, in that this much time has passed so that means I must have learned x. But I don’t know what I’ve learned or what I know.” – pg. 253
“I hated the pace of my career at the time, because I’m super fucking impatient, but fast fame would be hard to handle. […] People who get famous very quickly can’t deal with the plethora (is that a word?) of shit that comes their way.” – pg. 49
“Looking back I realize everything happened for a reason, but you could not tell me that then.” – pg. 70
“They laughed and then one said, mostly to his buddy, ‘If I ever wake up the day after a gig and there’s money in my pocket I know I did something wrong.’ They both cracked up at this. I’m not sure why I remember that exchange so vividly, but it stuck with me. Those guys were just doing gigs to tread water. […] I wanted a life out of it.” – pg. 72
“I’m just as competitive as the next guy, but if you handle competition like a dick, you’ll end up ruining your career and your friendships.” – pg. 130
“I do try to be valuable. I try to bring whatever I can to the table. I want whatever project I’m on to do well.” – pg. 150
“When people are better than you don’t be jealous. Respect it and use it to drive yourself to be better.” – pg. 150
“Throwaway jokes like that are important. They don’t get huge laughs but they’re nice texture and they carry the style of your humor across. […] Those are my favorite kinds of jokes, the ones that pay off the tenth time you see the film.” – pg. 169
“People forget that making a shitty movie is just as hard as making a good one.” – pg. 170
“Taking things too far was the thing that made him Chris [Farley]. but it was also the thing that took him away in the end. I miss the guy every day.” – pg. 177
“Supposedly when someone asked [George Clooney], ‘Why aren’t you married? Aren’t you afraid of being lonely?’ he replied, ‘The loneliest I’ve ever been was when I was married.'” – pg. 210
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