“I do not have very much office experience.”

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.

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 tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,

But in the movies, I just love the heavies. It’s much more fun.

The music business doesn’t take up that much of my time.

Too much philosophy makes men mad.

Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.

I spend as much time as I can sketching from nature,

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.