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

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.

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

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

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 suppose I had my rock star fantasies while I was singing into my hairbrush in the bathroom mirror, but I never really consciously said, ‘OK, this is what I’m going to do for a living and I’m going to be Weird Al.’

When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.

I thought, what’s going on? Did some whale get washed up to shore? So I stood up on the table to see what it was, and it was the director.

I know now that everything I write, I’m going to put out, and I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life.

Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you’re going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.

My process for the parodies is that I get an idea for a song and then get approval from the artist and then go in and record it and probably try to get it out as soon as possible.

I need to hear something about how he`s going to bring people together in the spirit, hopefully, of Martin Luther King Jr., and if that`s not heard, then we`ve got to constantly challenge him.

It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I’ve ever done, so it’s a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.