Category: Bookshelf

“I’m not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud.” – pg. 16

“That therapist’s insight has been correct every single time – if a woman keeps her shoes on, it’s a make-out session at best.” – pg. 56

“I can’t decide if I actually like people or not.” – pg. 64

“You know how sometimes the universe has plans for you that are hard to believe, how the world wants something for you even though you’ve done your best to close off that avenue? Welcome to my 1994.” – pg. 79

“You have to get famous to know that it’s not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.” – pg. 81

“There are no stars here. This is an ensemble show. We’re all supposed to be friends.” – Courteney Cox, pg. 90

“God is everywhere – you just have to clear your channel, or you’ll miss it.” – pg. 161

“I don’t want to die. I’m scared to die.” – pg. 219

“I don’t need to put on a show anymore. I have made my mark. Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy it.” – pg. 229

“There is such freedom in living for yourself. Only really being responsible for yourself.” – pg. 130

“I personally want to raise someone cool so there aren’t only idiots to inherit the earth.” – pg. 137

“It’s hard to know what’s best for your kid, but one thing is for sure: you want them to be able to relate to other people in the world.” – pg. 186

“If I’m not around, I feel like you will float off into the ether of worry and anxiety. And my job is to remind us of the practical reality.” – Moshe Kasher, pg. 201

“Because, at the end of the day? It’s your career, life, face, image, and feelings on the line, and no one should care – or have the power to fuck things up for you – more than you.” – pg. 26

“I’m not going to downplay my strengths just so you feel less shitty about your own shortcomings.” – pg. 44

“P.S. If her name is Kelsey, I guarantee they’re all trying to fuck her. There are no ugly Kelseys.” – pg. 76

“The common denominator among my women friends is consistency. They show up, they care, they don’t judge.” – pg. 82

“If you couldn’t do the thing you loved most, would you truly feel complete? If I couldn’t express myself and make people laugh for a living, I would crumble inside.” – pg. 142

“You’ll realize that all the fretting and self-loathing wasn’t worth it because […] everyone else is only paying attention to themselves anyway.” – pg. 149

“By the way, ‘Your standards are too high’ is someone’s subtle way of saying that you want someone that brings more to the table than you are bringing yourself. There’s no such thing as ‘too high’ if you’re exceptional! You think anyone ever told Leonardo DiCaprio his standards were too high?” – pg. 170

“You teach people how to treat you.” – pg. 215

“I guess I choose to focus on the negative versus basking in the positive […] because some part of me doesn’t think anything I’ve done is actually all that great.” – pg. 222

“Passion is doing something over and over and never growing tired of it.” – pg. 224

“It’s really hard to be mysterious if no one is paying attention to you in the first place.” – pg. 46

“One thing I appreciate about the crew is that […] they are there every day. […] They are the village that it takes to make a movie – no job is too big, no job is too small, and all of them are the filmmakers.” – pg. 93

“I have learned to live in, and love, all of these cities. […] Sure I have my melodramatic homesick moments […], but I’ve gotten good at making new friends.” – pg. 144

“I had an acting teacher, Eden Cooper-Sage, who told me ‘We are what we spend our time doing.'” – pg. 158

“We never moved in with each other. And as of today, we still haven’t. […] We lead a very double life. Or we have the best of both worlds, depending on your preferred idiom.” – pg. 192

“The best time to plant an apple orchard is twenty years ago; the second best time is today.” – Doug Chalke via Sarah Chalke, pg. 197

“Never promise crazy a baby.” – George Bluth Sr., regarding promising Kitty Sanchez a baby while hiding out with her, pg. 199

“How long would you spend trying to fit a puzzle piece into a puzzle where it didn’t fit? More than a minute?” – pg. 226

“Make everyone you love feel loved.” – pg. 231

“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