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

I do not have very much office experience.

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.

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.

I don’t watch scary movies. Sometimes, even having to read the script and do an episode of ‘Grimm’, I get a little tense because I know someone’s going to jump out of somewhere.

We don’t have any power of creation – we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

My first ‘SNL’ episode was with Michael Phelps and Lil Wayne. And if you go back and watch the monologue.

I loved being in Close Encounters, just to watch Steven Spielberg working was exciting.

One of the big secrets of finding time is not to watch television.

Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

Comedy can be destructive, and still very, very funny. But if I can do something that is fun to watch and critical of the world but not wantonly destructive.

I’m friends with a lot of comedians, but we don’t talk about material. Most comedians I know don’t watch a lot of other comedy.