“Good comics gravitate to each other; you know who’s your type of person by watching them onstage, hopefully.”

Battered Women: sounds delicious. Doesn’t make it right.

It’s not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.

Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.

Nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.

If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can’t they be well paid for changing young minds?

The most exciting thing I aspire to do is to write something new that I know is going to work, or perform something that I know is going to make people laugh.

Regret is just perfectionism plus time.

I think it’s better to not know certain things. It gives the world an extra bit of mystery, which is important to us as human beings.

Different people have different styles, but there is an opportunity as a director to be a writer in every moment, with every visual cue and every piece of production design. Everything is a decision, and everything can be obsessed over.

I wanted to be a writer first, and I struck out in the world to be a writer first, and then found stand-up as a more creative outlet, as a 3D way to be creative.

Mindy Kaling gets her own line in the acknowledgments, as previously negotiated by her representatives. Thanks, Mindy. I love you and you’re the best.

Perfect. Why was this so hard to find?”The other type of perfect is the type you never could have expected and then could never replicate.

If you love something, let it go. If you don’t love something, definitely let it go. Basically, just drop everything, who cares.

There’s not many good comedies to watch – you know, comedies that make you glad you watched them.

I’m a believer in trusting the director.

The Office’ is less a comedy than so many other “comedies” that have been on the air. It’s really about the balance between what is real and what is comic.

I always try to put myself out of my comfort zone and out of my depth, and hopefully somewhere along the line I’ll catch up.

But hopefully we are honest towards the people around us so that we can conquer it.

I did my homework, of course, by inhaling as much literature as was available to find.

I’ve just got to be myself and hopefully people will find me. And my audience did find me.

I said, ‘Well hopefully you could just call me Aimee. But if you have to describe it, I’m a bilateral below-the-knee amputee.’

Hopefully, other successes aren’t like me. It carries much more meaning to other people; my success story is irrelevant. It doesn’t make any sense.

We can never achieve absolute truth but we can live hopefully by a system of calculated probabilities.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.