Quotes by Mike Birbiglia

Saturday night is perfect for writers because other people have plans.

...And so we go and I meet his parents. And its a very strange thing meeting your girlfriends boyfriends parents for the first time. Part of you is angry for obvious reasons and part of you still wants to make a good impression. On a side note, they seemed in perfect health.

Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.

I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.

I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.

They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.

Dopamine is a chemical released in your brain and your body when you sleep that paralyzes your body so you dont act out your dreams.

I like Donnie Darko its a cool take on dreams and sleep.

I feel that marriage can lead to the ultimate rejection and failure and divorce and things we all fear.

Starbucks is the last public space with chairs. Its a shower for homeless people. And its a place you can write all day. The baristas dont glare at you. They dont even look at you.

When I was starting out, I thought I would go into comedy and there would be a mentor, like the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in Almost Famous, in my life, and there just wasnt. It was really frustrating for me because I desired that so much.

I love pizza. I want to marry it, but it would just be to eat her family at the wedding.

Theres something about small venues thats amazing for developing material. Its almost like you can not only hear peoples response, but you can understand it. In bigger venues you lose that, but you gain this sense of camaraderie in the audience.

As a comedian, you want people to like you. Thats part of why youre there in the first place: You have this unquenchable need to be liked, and then when you divert from that and take a chance at doing something that has moments of fierce unlikeability, you can hit some real low points.

You cant go to medical school and come out and be like, Im going to be a dog catcher. That would be so pointless.

Im generally so disoriented during the week about what Im doing and where I am - I travel a lot - that when Im home on a Sunday, I typically try to sleep in as much as I can.

Directing a movie is a little bit like being back in student government and putting on the homecoming dance. Youre like, You put up the streamers, and you hire the DJ, and you get the punch bowl. Some people are just like, This dance sucks. And youre like, No no, this dance is awesome! You have to be really positive.

I never looked at my parents marriage or really anyone who had been married more than 30 years and thought, I gotta get me some of that!

Ive actually always wanted to write like a one-person show that was sort of a romantic comedy - a show that was kind of cynical about romance and marriage but ultimately embraced it. Because I feel like comedy is always cynical, inherently, because its contrarian.

Someone said to me at a party once, Oh, yeah, youre a comedian? Then how come youre not funny now? And I just wanted to say, Well, Im just going to take this conversation were having and then repeat that to strangers, and then thats the joke. Youre the joke later.