“Don’t try to participate in anyone else’s idea of what is supposed to happen in a relationship. You will fail.” – pg. 14
“Scrupulous people don’t enjoy causing trouble, but they can be defiant as hell.” – pg. 55
“I think self-doubt is healthy, and having to fight for the thing you want doesn’t mean you deserve it any less.” – pg. 69
“People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald’s hash brown if it’s all they got.” – pg. 18
“When you’re beginning to suspect you might be leaving a place, you become hypersensitive to it, as if your mind is subconsciously stacking itself with smells, sounds, sights, and tactile sensations of a place you’ll no longer see every day.” – pg. 86
“Anything we create has to involve simplifying, leaving, or destroying the world we’re living in.
Zombies simplify. Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure in tact. The world, appearance-wise, survives. Zombies tend to be the most nihilistic of the three. Zombies can’t believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits.
Spaceships leave. Spaceships figure it’s easier to build a world and know its history or, better yet, choose the limited customs and rituals that fit the story. Spaceships are the ones most likely to get married and have kids.
Wastelands destroy. They’re confused but fascinated by the world. Post-nuke, post-meteor strike, or simply a million years into the future – that’s the perfect environment for the Wasteland’s imagination to gallop through. Weirdly, Wastelands are the most hopeful and sentimental of the bunch. Because even though they’ve destroyed the world as they know it, they conceive of stories in which a core of humanity survives and endures.” – pg. 97-101
“The Buddhists say that you shouldn’t let shame about pain cause you to feel a second, self-inflicted pain.” – pg. 37
“Groucho replies, ‘If I didn’t know what sad was, why would I spend my whole life trying to make people laugh?’ My head exploded. It felt like everything made sense. I was trying to be funny because I was sad.” – pg. 212
“You think, I wish I was there, not here. But then you get there. And you think, I thought here would be different. I thought it would be more like there. But it’s more like here again. And it never ends.” – pg. 249
“Focus on your own goals and how to achieve them. No one took your spot, there’s room for all of us.” – pg. 159
“When your fears come true, you realize they weren’t as bad as you thought. As it turns out, the fear is more painful than the insult.” – pg. 313
“Fake confidence on the outside, as I will later learn, often trumps truthful turmoil on the inside.” – pg. 58
“There was a price to be paid for a culture that idealizes the relentless pursuit of, ‘self.'” – pg. 65
“I do the best job I can and then let the results be what they will. I am out of the people-pleasing business.” – pg. 264
“Say yes to any opportunity to grow and/or do good work. You never know where it will lead or who might be paying attention.” – pg. 266
“If you can’t get honest with yourself, if you can’t look yourself in the mirror, no matter how much money they pay you, or how much you are lauded, you are literally putting your life at risk.” – pg. 271
“Bossypants Lesson #183: You can’t boss people around if they don’t really care.” – pg. 79
“You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.” – pg. 113
“Ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this person in between me and what I want to do?’ If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way.” – pg. 130
“Sometimes if you have a difficult decision to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.” – pg. 183
“When people say, ‘You really, really must’ do something, it means you don’t really have to. […] When it’s true, it doesn’t need to be said.” – pg. 220
“I realized that as we grow older, we adjust and roll with what we have in the present, though it may not be the future we had dreamed up for ourselves in the past.” – pg. 139
“No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out.” – pg. 75
“When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things.” – pg. 117
“In my mind, the sexiest thing in the world is the feeling that you’re wanted.” – pg. 153
“When one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet.” – pg. 184
“It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound.” – pg. 27
“It’s weird when you feel your dream slipping away from you. Especially when you have no other dreams.” – pg. 77
“Sure, there are moments of panic and occasional bouts of crying, but there’s also the joy of creating something I love.” – pg. 101
“People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That’s a mistake.” – pg. 218
“People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you’re succeeding. People do not get scared when you’re failing.” – pg. 222
“I want to get under people’s skin and provoke in addition to having a hopeful message.” – pg. 20
“If I’ve learned anything – anything – getting older, it’s the value of moment-to-moment enjoyment. […] So if I come here and talk to you, if I have an enjoyable three hours, God damn it, that counts.” – Albert Brooks, pg. 45
“It makes everyone feel better to acknowledge that no one has it together. I mean, I don’t know anyone that doesn’t have this big, dark cloud hanging over them. Just knowing that makes me feel better.” – Amy Schumer, pg. 52
“But you learn more from fucking up than you do from success, unfortunately. And failure, if you don’t let it defeat you, is what fuels your future success.” – Chris Rock, pg. 70
“Certain stories can be very small, but if you’re incredibly honest about them, there’s so much to do there.” – pg. 114
“I feel like most comedians have broken parents who don’t know how to mirror you; they want you to take care of them. So you spend your life trying to please other people and thinking that you are significant because you can change the world or change things, but you find out that you really can’t, and then you’re miserable.” – pg. 197
“I think it means so much whenever you see somebody that you relate to in whatever way kicking ass and succeeding.” – pg. 242
“I didn’t know why, but I liked that people were telling everybody to fuck off. But I found that I didn’t have very strong opinions when I was a stand-up comedian. I didn’t have the anger to do it. So I wrote.” – Mike Nichols, pg. 367
“And everybody’s like, ‘You’re fucking rich,’ but they don’t get it. They don’t get that you have to fucking do it. It’s not about if you’re rich or not. Because it’s what you love. You have to do it because that’s the only thing you know how to do.” – Roseanne Barr, pg. 396
“Making a movie takes so much out of you, but it also gives you so much. […] It’s a love relationship in one way, in terms of negotiating what you need from it, and what it needs from you. It’s also a parent relationship, in that you can’t need too much from it. You have to give to it unconditionally and you have to allow it to be who it is – not to put your needs on it. And then you let it go – it graduates high school and you send it off into the world; you’ve done everything you can do.” – Spike Jonze, pg. 447
“It’s a real challenge because success never satisfies whatever you thought it was going to do for you. You think, oh, I thought success would heal me and it doesn’t. So you have to look for new reasons to keep making things.” – pg. 498
“So much stuff doesn’t work, but you don’t expect everything to work.” – David Sedaris, pg. 553
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