Category: Bookshelf

“I don’t change my behavior because I don’t suffer the consequences.” – pg. 71

“I always thought the title of my memoir would be ‘What Am I Doing Here?’ I’ve asked myself that question a million times throughout my years working for Conan. […] It’s not because I don’t think I’ve earned the right to be there, but more because I long ago had resigned myself to the idea that I simply didn’t belong.” – pg. 143

“I can show up and be me. And after all the work I’ve done on myself over the years, I’m more than happy with that.” – pg. 228

“I hope you find the satisfaction from working that I’ve been lucky to find. You deserve it. Everyone does. Even if we’re the worst at what we do.” – pg. 254

“Over on the waterbed, a human cupcake scrolls Twitter, copying down opinions for me to recycle as my own at a dinner party, thereby rescuing me from the excruciating tedium of original thought.” – pg. 10

“I don’t want my worst nightmare to be wrinkles and irrelevance.” – pg. 15

“It’s hard to touch magic and then go home.” – pg. 24

“The second I got tits I also got eyes that rolled and arms that crossed.” – pg. 57

“Women’s darkness is so much more than inevitable and interesting than a broken heart […]. Figuring out how to use it as a superpower is the tricky part” – pg. 69

“There is no limit on how many times the heart can break.” – pg. 97

“Why does it take us so long to ask the question, Wait, is this hurting me?“ – pg. 104

“It’s hard to learn to dream when you’ve spent all your energy trying to be one for someone else.” – pg. 105

“Apparently success required the thing I didn’t have: liking yourself. Liking yourself enough to disable self-criticism.” – pg. 111

“Make your demons trade knives for paintbrushes.” – pg. 113

“I was going to pretend to be a person who believed in themselves until it wasn’t a lie anymore.” – pg. 120

“In a way failure was salvation. It froze time so I could keep learning.” – pg. 121

“The tote bags and hashtags that seem to be the skywriting of modern feminism would have you believe we solved it.” – pg. 142

“My brain is a room full of women who take turns at the wheel. It’s the only way I can make sense of what it feels like to be alive.” – pg. 152

“A lot of the magic around someone having a ‘moment’ is paid for, and white-knuckled, and a full, booming, churning business unto itself.” – pg. 190

“I never worried more about money than when I started having a little.” – pg. 206

“In all my running from myself, it is hard to remember that I also love the thing I’m running from. That I’m in all this for the big feelings. I don’t want them to be muted. […] The Barbie stuff is smaller but easier, more numb. Safer. Those lows aren’t as deep and harrowing.” – pg. 230

“A flourishing person sounds like she’s more fulfilled, complete, and impressive than a ‘happy’ person.” – pg. 21

“The best thing about Aristotle’s ‘constant learning, constant trying, constant searching’ is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person.” – pg. 34

“I believe that consideration [is] the glue that holds society together.” – pg. 82

“Trying to do the right thing all the time is – and I’m going to use a fairly wonky, technical term here, so bear with me – a huge pain in the ass.” – pg. 147

“The point is this: to demand perfection, or to hold people to impossible standards, is to deny the simple and beautiful realty that nobody is perfect.” – pg. 252

“Humans have this problem: we’re kind of trapped inside our own brains.” – pg. 257

“I have been a gainfully employed writer since 1997, thanks to […] countless people who gave me a shot, kept giving me shots when I didn’t really deserve them, taught me how to shoot better, or liked the way I shoot enough to extend my shooting contract.” – pg. 265

“They say you learn best when you’re having fun.” – pg. 40

“I learned that sometimes it was important not to spoil the magic.” – pg. 110

“He was great at reminding us, simply by the way he held himself, to take our opportunity seriously, while having a lot of fun doing so.” – pg. 167

“If you tell a person he’s great enough times, he’ll start to believe it.” – pg. 247

“I didn’t go out for the sake of going out, or because other people were telling me to” – pg. 281

“Just as we all experience physical ill-health at some stage in our lives, so we all experience mental ill-health too” – pg. 282

“The only true currency we have in life is the effect we have on those around us.” – pg. 286

“I was flying from Los Angeles to New York and I decided to take the script with me and make a decision before I landed. I read it three times on the plane. I said to myself… This is funny, and funny is what I should be doing.”

“I have a maxim about the film business I have kept in my head for my whole career. ‘You don’t know if a film is any good until at least ten years after its release.'”

“During the writing, I learned that the best way to adapt a story for a movie was to follow the course of a failed marriage: fidelity, transgression, divorce. Fidelity: You stay true to the original story at all costs. Transgression: You slip a bit and write something that works but ‘cheats’ on the original story. Divorce: You finally separate from the original and let the screenplay be what it wants to be.”

“I like bad movies and bad comedy and bad writing and bad editing.” – pg. 4

“I don’t care if you’re a total stranger. Ring my doorbell and say ‘I’m here to see the briefcase magnet.’ I will put on a pair of pants and start brewing some coffee.” – pg. 4

“I’ll do anything to not write when someone is paying me. I’ll even write about not writing to avoid writing.” – pg.11

“Believe it or not, my dream is to leave this world without having been responsible for anyone’s pain.” – pg. 112

“I am definitely more talented than people who get more done and make more money than me.” – pg. 132

“None of us are bad people. We float around and we run across each other and we learn about ourselves, and we make mistakes and we do great things. We hurt others, we hurt ourselves, we make others happy and we please ourselves. We can and should forgive ourselves and each other for that.” – pg. 137

“Doing TV comedy is the definition of insanity. First, you and your staff tell each other 30 jokes, and you keep the ten that make everybody laugh. Sane enough. Then you spend three months telling those ten jokes to each other 5,000 times each, until not a single one is funny by anyone’s standards.” – pg. 147

“I’m the guy that writes unairable TV shows. I’m so good at it that the one time I accidentally wrote an airable one, it fired me.” – pg. 149

“If you don’t even know who you are and all you know is that you want to be loved, you’ll try to be anyone you can be in order to get loved.” – pg. 157

“Nobody’s out to hurt me, if only for the simple reason that they’ve got better things to do with their time.” – pg. 158

“Some people are crazy, for real – not crazy like me and my friends, who call ourselves crazy to keep ourselves in check.” – pg. 167

“My goal is to reduce the rate at which I plunge into a relationship until it’s actually slower than the rate at which I get sick of someone.” – pg. 172

“You need to understand, in case you don’t already, that I’m an obsessive man. I have a mental problem. I obsess. And it helps me in my work, and it hurts me in my work. And it helps me in love, and it hurts me in love. It bewilders me in traffic, it suffocates me at the bank, it lets me jump over certain skyscrapers and it keeps me from tying my shoes. I’m not a hero. I’d like to think I’m not a villain, but I am not a hero. I am just another crazy person.” – pg. 180

“I should learn to live my life like that, remove the backspace key, stay in the moment.” – pg. 190

“You’d think my life was hard from watching me avoid living it.” – pg. 192

“We were sometimes happy but often bored and mostly miserable. As with all my relationships. As with relationships in general.” – pg. 198

“I believe that 10% of all people are just smart enough to tell that 85% what to do and think, and just dumb enough to believe it’s acceptable to do so. […] I look at myself as belonging to the remaining 5%, an elite group of enlightened people who lead by example, never by force, and who choose to pursue their own perfection, and thereby the perfection of humanity.” – pg. 215

“Like every human on the planet, I just want other people to like me. I want them to think I’m good at my job.” – pg. 218

“Your life unfolds. It’s not a maze where you turn left or right, it’s just a little ride where you’re buckled in and then it’s over.” – pg. 222

“I don’t trust your value system if you have to assert it. It’s my first indication that you don’t believe what you’re saying. If I’m at a party, and I ask what your favorite movie is, and you tell me your favorite movie is real life and you don’t like movies because they remove you from the more important story of humanity, I don’t believe you, and it’s not because I’m a cynic, it’s because if you really felt that way, it would have been easier for you to say, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Star Wars’ so we could get on with te actual human interaction you love so fucking much.” – pg. 230

“Everything I’ve ever done just sort of floats to the middle of the tank and nothing has ever broken the surface and I have no reason to suspect any of it ever will.” – pg. 257

“There will be discouragement from all sides, but unless it comes from inside, don’t pay attention to it.” – pg. 275

“Everyone’s an idiot. If everyone wasn’t an idiot, I wouldn’t be perceived as smart.” – pg. 278

“Yours, Mine, and Duprees,
Dan Harmon” – pg. 281

“I like my words and for some reason I need them to be publicly posted in order to write them.” – pg. 302

“The attempt to start being funny starts with the internal recognition that you’re currently not being funny or feeling funny.” – pg. 327

“It’s called ‘social grace,’ I don’t really have it and you can’t force it with kids. […] So now I just ignore kids and some of them warm up to me before they get old enough to start making fun of me.” – pg. 359

“The only thing worse than being a bad writer is being pretentious and acting like your bad writing really takes a lot out of you.” – pg. 420

“To mutate one of my favorite proverbs: There are two ways to think. You can think there are two ways to think, or you can think.” – pg. 425

“The same amount of work goes into the ones that bomb.” – David Spade on 2/22/23, 28:18

“I think there are people that have career dysmorphia. They don’t understand how much they bring to the table and they tend to run themselves down, and they tend to say, ‘I’m no good. I’m not nearly as good as these other people.’ And you’re looking at them thinking, ‘You’re fantastic. You’re amazing.'” – Conan O’Brien on 12/14/22, 2:13:55

“Comedy’s enemy is distraction.” – pg. 2

“I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product.” – pg. 2

“I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts.” – pg. 29

“All entertainment is or is about to become old-fashioned.” – pg. 51

“I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.” – pg. 54

“Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.” – pg. 104

“To politics I was saying, ‘I’ll get along without you very well. It’s time to be funny.'” – pg. 144

“In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go.” – Eric Fischl, pg. 202

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rapper, a comedian, a poet, a professional basketball player, a country singer, a break-dancer, or the owner of a pizza restaurant where third graders could hang out.” – pg. 17

“To be a comedian you have to be delusional. I think it’s because the human brain can’t process the amount of judgment that an audience casts upon you when you do standup comedy.” – pg. 25

“When I think about the people I’ve looked up to in my life, they all tend to be people who can’t stop.” – pg. 134

“We all have our share of secrets and dirty laundry […]. I see writing this book as a process of washing my laundry and hanging it out in the sun and fresh air to dry.” – pg. ix

“[I] was quite content being solitary as a child. In fact, I am still very much like that now. Not lonely, but alone with my thoughts, emotions, and reflections.” – pg. 12

“My goal in music was to please myself by loving the music I sang and wrote.” – pg. 95

“When you’re clutching a guitar, even if you’re not particularly playing it much, it functions as a shield between you and the audience.” – pg. 152

“In order to be a world-class expert in anything, […] one needs to have 10,000 hours of practice. On a pragmatic level, it takes about three hours a day over ten years to acquire 10,000 hours.” – Daniel J. Levitan, pg. 163

“I didn’t enjoy music for the fact that it brought me attention; I enjoyed it because the music itself brought me pleasure.” – pg. 167

“Artists have their entire life to write their first album, but less than a year to write their second.” – pg. 274

“I believe like any song, it belongs to whoever claims it, and its purpose becomes whatever it means for that individual.” – pg. 324

“Most things that I do in life I do because I enjoy the process, not because I think there is going to be a payoff at the end.” – pg. 344

“Address gaps with your partner and talk about them, acknowledge them.” – pg. 357

“Best not leave everlasting proof of your temporary insanity.” – Jane Fonda, pg. 361

“Time is like sleep: once you lose it, you never get it back.” – pg. 397

“I also am learning to accept that I won’t shine any more or less than I was created to.” – pg. 401

“There is always someone worse off and someone better off no matter what your lot in life. Your fortune or misfortune is relative to whatever surrounds you.” – pg. 404

“Unlike the spoken word, writing allows more time for reflection and revision.” – pg. 408