Best 117 quotes of Patton Oswalt on MyQuotes

90% of every art form is garbage - dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that's good, suck it up, and drive on.

A lot of nerds aren't aware they're nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, 'I speak Klingon - who am I fooling? You win! I'm just gonna openly like what I like.' Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.

Any acting job that I ever got, I always treated it like I was a neophyte, I didn't know what I was doing and I was going to work just as hard as I do on my stand-up.

Any comedian who tells you how dark and dangerous they are, they're not dark and dangerous.

Anything's better than Gen X which is what we got. Thanks Douglas Coupland. We sound like a team of mutant vigalantees with frosted hair and chain wallets. Actually that's not completely horrible.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

As unhealthy as I am, I'm weirdly aware of exactly how my body functions.

As you get older, as a comedian, and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.

Based on my own experience, when you're going through adolescence you don't know how the world works. You can't set a story in the world you live in because you don't know what a utility bill is, or how to budget your paycheck.

Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, This is where I wanna be.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

But for the most part, for the majority of a stand-up audience, you better have new stuff they've not heard. And if you put an album out, just consider that material gone. At least that's how I see it.

Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you.

Doing 'Young Adult' was really reassuring to me in a lot of ways. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about great actors.

Even if it's other people, like on MySpace pages, we're just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we're in.

Every audience is different, even within the same venue. You have to just make every audience your audience; you can't pre-judge an audience based on the size of the room or the type of room.

Everything we have today that's cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more.

Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact. That infrastructure might be on fire, yes.

George Bush is not stupid. He's evil. OK? There's a huge difference between stupid and evil.

Growing up there are always those kids who are only happy when they are making someone else upset. That is unfortunately just how some people are. And their parents were fine. Some people are just born with bad wiring.

Growing up there are always those kids who are only happy when they are making someone else upset. That is unfortunately just how some people are. Some people are just born with bad wiring.

Having enough money has to go hand in hand with living in a way that you're not being a slave to your possessions.

I can't say that I ever abided nerd stereotypes: I was never alone or felt outcast.

I fantasize and idealize myself as Bugs Bunny, but I know deep down I'm Daffy Duck.

If I were to just focus on stand-up, I could actually, paradoxically enough, be home way more, because I would leave on a Friday, go do a couple theaters Friday, Saturday, maybe Sunday, come home.

If Kevin James or Paul Giamatti drop weight, I'm done. I don't want to be the last pudge out there.

If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.

If you hit a midget on the head with a stick, he turns into 40 gold coins.

If you play comedic scenes like they're really serious, then it's so much more funny than if you're going for a laugh.

I grew up in such a featureless, personality-less suburb. There was nothing to push against.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out if me with steel pipes.

I hate all sidekicks.

I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn't like that battle, or they just couldn't do it. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. But they lost those crucial years of learning to turn any audience into your audience.

I have a very tiny house in Burbank. I drive an 8-year-old car. I'm gonna drive it into the ground. I enjoy what I enjoy.

I haven't sworn off Facebook. I'm on Facebook. There's a fan page on Facebook that I will update, but I'm on there myself under a pseudonym, because there were a lot of people able to private-message me on Facebook, and it was getting really weird. And then with MySpace, I just don't read messages. I delete everything, and I just post updates every now and then.

I have some shorter stories coming out in other books early next year. I might be pitching a re-vamp of Ghost Rider in the spring. We'll see.

I identify myself as a stand-up first. Even though lately there's been an explosion of acting on my schedule.

I know how my body operates differently from what it did when it was 30 and when it was 20. As unhealthy as I am, I'm weirdly aware of exactly how my body functions.

I like confounding expectations. I can expand what it is I am able to do, and hopefully get to do more weird, interesting projects like this. There's nothing wrong with doing comedies, and I'm not against comedies, either, but I always want to do stuff that keeps me off my guard and gets me out of my comfort zone. And how the audience perceives that... It's out of my hands. And I don't get that frustrated by it, because I'm on to the next thing at that point.

I look pretty nondescript. I don't go out of my way to... I don't express my personality with my clothes, with my car or my, you know, house. I express with my personality; so as far as what I wear - I don't really care about that.

I love doing movies, but right now, television is the way Hollywood was in the late '60s and early '70s. The dream era I would have loved to have been part of in Hollywood then is happening right now, but it's happening on television, with these big complicated story arcs and real character-driven shows and sheer ambiguity left and right.

I love the beginning of Magnolia, the thing about the dealer. That scene is genius. Brilliantly acted.

I'm always trying out new stuff onstage. That's where I do all my writing.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.

I'm glad that that era of stand-up is over, because I think it adversely affected a lot of people who could have been really, really great comedians. Because they unconsciously or subconsciously stifled their wild impulses, and were thinking about the five clean minutes for The Tonight Show, or the 20-minute sitcom pitch as a stand-up act.

I'm going to continue to try to strike a balance, because I really, really do love doing stand-up, and I don't see why it should affect the acting. And again, I'm not going, "I've got to become a dramatic actor now." I just want more interesting jobs. I just want to keep doing stuff that's different.

I'm grateful that I had that uphill battle for 10 years of going onstage and having nobody know who I was, because you have to win them over. I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn't like that battle. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. That's why they're okay stand-ups, but they're never going to be great, because they don't have that presence. They never built those muscles up.

I'm grateful that I had that uphill battle for 10 years of going onstage and having nobody know who I was, because you have to win them over.

I'm so beyond genre, drama, comedies, I just want to do really good, interesting projects.