“the freedom to live a life free of fear of violence, to select a fulfilling career and be compensated fairly, to choose when to start a family, to marry whom you love.”

I grew up on the back of a motorcycle – my dad didn’t have a car until I was a teenager. And then my closest friend from grade school was a guy.

After going through a lot of procedures and spending a lot of money … the doctor said, ‘Look, based on what we’re seeing here, I just don’t think this is going to happen for you.’

You can only really learn from failure … To win, you need to fail, and fail hard.

I love it when I come across a word I don’t know. And I would never treat my audience like they weren’t smart enough to come along with me.

So much of a stand-up’s life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

I liked comedy, but didn’t know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney.

I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don’t tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards.

When I was young I thought, ‘Yeah, people don’t see, they’re not recognizing how funny I am, and how talented I am’. And the guys that mentored me were like, ‘

I started out being a stand up and writing my own material. That took me to Talk Soup, where I was writing and performing for TV.

So I think the longer you do stand-up, the more comfortable you are. You stop wanting to hide your foibles and instead want to show who you are.

I will say that stand-up is my first love; it’s how I got started and is in my bones.

Pop culture is great, but it can be bad, at times.

I like to be nice. I want to be a hero. I want to save people. Or just kill zombies, because they deserve it, because they’re already dead and they can’t feel it. They don’t have feelings.

I always wanted to be as busy as possible so that if one job went away I’d still have plenty of other things to do.

Comedy is ugly. It’s honest, it’s raw.

I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also lying down.

I almost feel like I didn’t pay enough dues, it was pretty incredible. I always thought I’d work with her, I just didn’t think it would happen at this point in my career.

If you look at my career and you look at the span of my work and the things I have done, as far as to garner fame, you’ll see that I have turned down more interviews than I do. Or I turn down more things than I do.

Over my career, I’ve had to adjust my game.

I may have turned out feeling that my life ended when my athletic career ended, as happens so many times with various athletes.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.