Patton Oswalt Quotes - Page 3

With acting, you see some of the kids are literally just off the street, untrained, and they are great. And others are off the street, untrained, and kind of horrible.

If you play comedic scenes like they're really serious, then it's so much more funny than if you're going for a laugh.

As you get older, as a comedian, and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.

I think right now is the best time for stand-up, ever. I sincerely do.

In my mind, I was always a comedian who was going to branch into writing.

Doing 'Young Adult' was really reassuring to me in a lot of ways. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about great actors.

Growing up there are always those kids who are only happy when they are making someone else upset. That is unfortunately just how some people are. And their parents were fine. Some people are just born with bad wiring.

I never said that movies were struggling behind TV. I'm just saying that movies have a better creative cache.

Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, This is where I wanna be.

Knock on wood, my groupies tend to be very artistic, creative people - sometimes way more creative than I am.

Here's what I'm afraid of. I know a lot of comedians, friends of mine, who just got into the "Doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter. They're just gonna laugh anyway."

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

When you put an album out, you can't do any material from the album if people are paying to see you.

I'm grateful that I had that uphill battle for 10 years of going onstage and having nobody know who I was, because you have to win them over. I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn't like that battle. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. That's why they're okay stand-ups, but they're never going to be great, because they don't have that presence. They never built those muscles up.

I really do love doing stand-up, and I don't see why it should affect the acting. And I just want more interesting jobs. I just want to keep doing stuff that's different, rather than saying, "Okay, I've become known for this, and I'll just do this from now on." If I feel like I've done this one thing, I never want to do it again. I want to do something totally different.

Nowadays - and I don't want to make some dopey cultural statement here - everyone can be, just by existing in society, because we all have a ship that we follow. Even if it's other people, like on MySpace pages, we're just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we're in.

I love doing movies, but right now, television is the way Hollywood was in the late '60s and early '70s. The dream era I would have loved to have been part of in Hollywood then is happening right now, but it's happening on television, with these big complicated story arcs and real character-driven shows and sheer ambiguity left and right.

Just think of yourself as starting from zero every time. That's what I do with every new role. I'm at zero, and I'm going to do the work.

I would always rather shoot for something unique and fail than do a script because I feel like they're hitting all the right mainstream beats.

One of my groupies gave me a film that they made, and it ended up being amazing, so I got it shown at South by Southwest. If I can help get their stuff out there, then great.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out if me with steel pipes.

The apocalypse is coming, that's the one thing I like about George Bush, I really think he can get us into the ... apocalypse, like the BIBLICAL ... I really think he believes that he'll be the guy in the white hat. I think he's read the Stephen King novel The Stand a couple times, and he really thinks there's a dark man in the desert somewhere and he's gonna fight him or something.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

When you act, you're being asked to pretend in a very rigid, controlled environment. It's very un-childlike. So a lot of times, when you put kids in that situation, you hope they have a better support system outside of what they're doing to bring them back to reality at the end of the day and to keep them well-rounded.