Zach Woods Quotes by Theme or Topic

A topic index of verified Zach Woods interview quotes. Office Ladies and Bullseye are quoted verbatim from official transcripts; other quotes are transcribed from video or machine transcripts and lightly edited for readability. Quotes where Woods is relaying someone else’s words are noted inline.

Anxiety, Numbness & Calm

“Basically, I hated vacations, which is a really kind of bitchy little Lord Fauntleroy thing to say, but I think I was so anxious that any change in my environment would just make me… that’s partly why I was constantly picking fights. But the Outer Banks, I would look forward to the water slides and the hush puppies.” (Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers, February 20, 2024)
“I think my personality was probably forged in the fires of Tourette’s and obsessive compulsive disorder.” (Take Your Shoes Off with Rick Glassman #258, June 5, 2024)
“I got in my head, well, what if my mom is a witch? I love my mom. I rely on my mom. I need my mom.” (Take Your Shoes Off with Rick Glassman #258, June 5, 2024)
“I would ask her, I’d say, are you a witch? She’d say no. I’d say good. But that’s what a witch would say.” (Take Your Shoes Off with Rick Glassman #258, June 5, 2024)
“If you think about what it’s like to be a kid and to think that your mother, in some way, as loving and nurturing as she is, might actually be a malevolent force. I’ve always had some version of that again and again and again.” (Take Your Shoes Off with Rick Glassman #258, June 5, 2024)
“Sometimes I really feel like anxiety is just like a giant military helicopter that needs someplace to land. And it was like, oh, today it’ll be landing on the landing pad of like vocal anxiety. Tomorrow it’ll be… some weird hypochondriacal thing in a different direction.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“Driving terrified me so much that I would show up on set and my jaw would be so clenched that I had a hard time saying words. So I would take Frank Sinatra CD’s and force myself to sing along with old blue eyes so that my jaw would stay open, so that I wouldn’t show up with, like, rigor mortis face.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“As an anxious person in my real life, there’s been times where when a crisis actually happens it can kind of be soothing, in a way. Because my interior sense of the world is finally synchronized with my exterior experience of the world. I’ve been expected [sic] the catastrophe, so when the catastrophe comes, it’s like, ‘Aah.’ The relaxation of harmony between expectation and event.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“Maybe it’s like mistaking numbness for fun. Sometimes I will sort of make myself numb and think of it as recreational. It’s highly stimulating and that is relieving. But the truth is it’s just about kind of comaing myself.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“My father worked at a mental hospital when he was in his twenties. He took the most depressive cases and drove to an airport where the planes come like screaming down right above, and he had all of them get out and lie on top of the van. And by the time they left, these people who were like catatonically depressed were like bouncing off the walls. They felt alive again.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“My shrink said this thing to me once where she was like, most of life is uncertainty. And so deciding to fill in those blanks with happier stories will make your life much better. When you know there’s no way to know the answer, decide that it’s something good.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024) (relaying his therapist)

Connection, Crushes & Love

“I generally think people want to connect and that the barrier to that is safety. It’s feeling like this person’s going to hurt me. But if you present as someone who is not out to cause harm, I think people might really take you up on the opportunity to have a frank conversation.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“Crushes are just exercises in projection. I remember thinking, this candle burns brighter than the rest of the candles on the cake. She’s just giving off a different voltage. And she was quite vulnerable at the same time, and that feeling of, oh, you’re both kind of ferocious and soft, was pretty irresistible. And has, in a way, continued to be irresistible.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“I got a recording of Moonlight Sonata, and I recorded myself over it professing my love to Kristen. And then I chickened out, and I sent her a CD of Moonlight Sonata instead. And I just wrote, ‘To my elegant friend.’” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“I said, well, she might say no and it’d be humiliating. And he said, ‘getting rejected is disappointing, but not asking is humiliating.’ And it was like, oh, fuck. But then I still didn’t ask.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024) (relaying his father)
“I like to hold hands crossing the street because a car might hit us, and for whatever reason holding a hand makes me feel safe.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“I think both handholding and side hugs share a thing, which is you’re still facing out towards the world side by side. At their best, relationships kind of feel that way: I feel a little safer, a little warmer, a lot more alive, but we haven’t just devolved into total navel-gazing. You’re still facing out into your lives, but you’re holding on to each other.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“I was on a train once, seated across from this woman, and we talked for such a long time and it got really emotional. I don’t think we ever learned each other’s names. It was a real hello and a real goodbye.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“There’s so much permission with strangers and in transit to be a version of yourself that you maybe aren’t comfortable being otherwise. And there can be a real vulnerability hangover, where you feel like you’ve been a little too naked, and it could be scary to be accountable to the version of yourself that you let slip in that context.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“There’s this play called The Real Thing, where you’ll encounter someone, and they might not be the most beautiful or the smartest, but for some reason you just know that in another life they would have been your person. Even though your paths will never converge, there’s some sort of affinity there. It’s kind of a good ache.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024) (invoking Tom Stoppard’s play)
“It is the messy parts of people that are the most enthralling and exciting and funny and stupid. When people sort of make their discomfort your problem, it drives me crazy.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“Be curious about the version of yourself you are with a date. Different people unlock different parts of you. If they’re a highlighter pen, what passages of me are they highlighting? And if they make you feel really exceptional, or you really like the version of yourself that shows up, that’s worth paying attention to.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“I asked a couples therapist what couples can reasonably expect from each other, and she said three things. One, you should empathize with each other and reflect each other’s experience. Two, you should expand each other’s world. And three, the person acts as a treasury of good feeling about you that you can make withdrawals from when you need it, this kind of Fort Knox of positive regard.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024) (relaying a couples therapist)
“Susan Sarandon was describing a story and she offhandedly said, oh, it’s one of those funny-foot-needs-a-funny-shoe stories. And I was like, that’s such a great way of describing it. We’re all funny feet. We all need orthotics made to our contours.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024) (relaying Susan Sarandon)
“I didn’t want it to be too elaborate, so I handed her the ring and I said, ‘You win.’ That’s my way of showing someone I love them.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024) (on proposing)

Family, Mentors & Growing Up

“You need your rabbis, you need your witches, you got to get ’em, and you got to be them when you can.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“New Jersey is my favorite state in the country, maybe my favorite place on earth.” (In the Know, COVE Podcast #31, January 23, 2024)
“I have a lot of nostalgia for Jersey. Like the Turnpike. I really love the Turnpike.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“Someone told me this thing once where they were like, places aren’t places, they’re times. When you think of a place, usually what you’re actually thinking of is a time in your life and a group of people. And I think as a place, Yardley is probably really nice as a time.” (Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers, February 20, 2024)
“Trenton’s got all this Victorian architecture, but then it’s very, very dangerous. So it’s like the set of Meet Me in St. Louis, but then the action of The Wire.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“My mother and father worked at a mental hospital. My mom was my father’s supervisor. My father’s a social worker, but he does clinical therapy.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“My younger sister is studying to be a rabbi. But like the most secular Jew. Our Seders when I was a kid were just like minstrels for Judaism. I have one grandfather who was a Lutheran who played organ in a church.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“One thing that was fairly specific about my upbringing is my parents sort of treated us all like little adults, from the time that we were pretty young. There’s probably a middle ground between letting your kid be driving home with the windows cracked and screaming and monitoring their every move. But I would rather be on the former end of the spectrum, rather than the latter.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“Allison Jones was like a fairy godmother to me. She talked to me for like an hour. And then at the end of it, she just went, I’m going to help you. Which is such a wild thing for someone to say in Hollywood. And then even a wilder thing to mean and follow through on.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“She really looked out for me in little ways.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 2, June 9, 2015) (on Amy Poehler bringing him into early UCB opportunities)
“I told my father [the Frankenstein story], and he’s like, that’s a story about kids. Frankenstein’s made from the pieces of a bunch of old dead people, which is essentially what a kid is in a genetic way. That question of why, why did you bring me here, it hangs over every parent.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024) (relaying his father)

Improv, UCB & the Comedy Life

“I felt terrible. I was like, I’m terrible at this. I felt bad about improv for the first 10 years I did it.” (BUILD Series NYC, May 10, 2017)
“I didn’t really have much in the way of ambition around acting. Once I did improv classes, I was like, oh, I just want to keep doing this.” (Salon Talks, February 17, 2020)
“One of the charms of starting at UCB during that time is no one had really become famous or rich or gotten a career out of it yet. So the self-selection was just all these weirdos who liked doing it.” (Salon Talks, February 17, 2020)
“It’s such a good feeling to be around a group of people who are united by their shared passion as opposed to their shared ambition.” (Salon Talks, February 17, 2020)
“You get to see that little boy or that little girl inside this adult, and it’s so moving. It’s so moving and it’s so nerdy.” (Salon Talks, February 17, 2020)
“I started doing improv at Upright Citizens Brigade in New York, and I mostly just thought I was going to do that. I remember talking to someone and being like, I just want to get a temp job and do improv at night.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“I remember once being in a cab in New York and going past an improv theater and seeing all these adults outside. You could not look nerdier and less cool. And I just felt my heart swell in my chest, like seeing these grown adults just kind of, they looked so happy. They were just being so cringe, so happily out in public on the street. I found it so moving.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“I always hated that. When people are like, ‘If you can do anything else, do it.’ The idea that you have to be completely identified with this one major part of your life, I think is kind of kooky. It also is like making a certain amount of bizarro emotional clarity a prerequisite for a creative life. And I think that’s dopey. And a little self-important, too.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“I would take the train from Pennsylvania up to New York, and I had this sort of secret comedy life. I liked the version of me in New York better than the version of me in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania. And so I sort of wanted to keep the one from contaminating the other.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“[Katie Dippold] was like, ‘What would your dream be? What would you wanna do, if you could do anything?’ And I was like, ‘I think I would wanna temp during the day, so that I could do improv at night.’ And I really meant it. It wasn’t some bohemian affectation.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“My brother had gone to college in New York and he told me about ASSSSCAT. I would take the train up into the city and take classes, from outside of Philadelphia.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“The first day in class, he said, tell everybody your name and what brought you here. And when it got to me, I said, my name’s Zach, and what brought me here was a train. And then I said, I’m actually 30 years old, but I have a disease that causes me to look younger. And then I was like, why are you laughing? I’m serious. I still feel so grateful to Billy that he didn’t just say, fuck this guy.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“Improv is one of the only places where I feel sort of unselfconscious, because I’ve been doing it long enough that I’m not watching myself do it. When a show’s going well, it’s the most sort of alive and myself that I feel.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“I always did it by myself with an audience. There’s something about improv where it’s shared responsibility and shared blame if it goes bad. The idea of doing it by myself is just totally alien.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“When I started at UCB, it was not this factory of television and film performers. It was this weird little basement in what used to be a strip club, kind of dingy, and it was just people doing really weird comedy stuff.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 2, June 9, 2015)
“They cleaned out a strip club and turned it into a small black box theater. They would still sometimes find condoms. The strip club had been popular with Hasids, so sometimes these Hasidic guys would come in and sit down thinking a strip show was about to start, but then they’d just be stuck watching alt-comedy for an hour, and they couldn’t leave.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)

Mortality, Grief & Gratitude

“When you’re free from the mire of your own terror, it gives you a chance to start to remember that you’re going to be gone. And that gives you an urgent need to pay attention.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“The older I get, the less awkward I feel because I’m like, I’ll be dead pretty soon. Why worry?” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“This will not be here. We will not be here. So don’t commit the sin of being so mired in anxiety that you don’t allow the gratitude and aliveness to flood you.” (In the Know, COVE Podcast #31, January 23, 2024)
“When I allowed joy to be the fuel as opposed to anxiety, and gratitude to be the fuel, then I felt like my work just got better and deeper and freer and more playful.” (In the Know, COVE Podcast #31, January 23, 2024)
“I remember hearing some interview with Mark Rylance, the actor. He said, like, when you die, probably the thing that flashes before your eyes isn’t the episodes of the shows, but the experience you had making them.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023) (relaying Mark Rylance)
“When I first got my dog, [the therapist] looked at me in the eyes and she went, ‘everything’s a foster.’ And I was like, wow, that’s right, like you don’t get to keep playing.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024) (relaying his therapist)
“Someone did say something to me, the pain you experience is [in] proportion to the love that you felt for the creature. And my friend who lost his dog said this thing that made me cry, where he was like, buy the ticket, take the ride.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024) (relaying others)
“Often people who grieve intensely for a long time, the grief occupies the vacancy that the person or dog or whatever left. The act of grieving takes up some of the emotional real estate where all of that engagement and love and everything used to be.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024) (relaying a grief researcher)
“He had this big, beautiful Great Dane, and the dog got old and died. And he said this thing that really stuck with me, where he was like, ‘I had the ticket, take the ride.’ I think heartbreak is just a feature. You opt in.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024) (relaying a friend)
“My therapist said, the second you start to love someone there is a part of you that knows, consciously or unconsciously, that one day you will lose them. You will lose them to growth in different directions, you will lose them to death, you will lose them to circumstance. And so as you’re dizzy and giddy, there’s also this dawning awareness of the proportional loss that is an unavoidable feature of loving someone.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024) (relaying his therapist)

Music, Trumpet & the Braces

“The way I got hooked on jazz, like all great jazz musicians, was a CD-ROM video game about the history of jazz. It was called Living Jazz. It had the format of a first-person shooter, but you were totally passive, wandering through the history of jazz.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“I started when I was in second grade. And I started devouring all these jazz books. I read the autobiography of Miles Davis.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“I got braces and I couldn’t play trumpet anymore. My parents took me to Wynton Marsalis’ dentist in New York. His name was Dr. Chops. Ultimately I had to get them, because my teeth were going to look like a train wreck otherwise.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“I used to take pliers and take the wire out of the braces, because I’d get so frustrated and I wanted to play. But then you had to get the wire back in, as a short-term fix.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“He had a life-size mural of himself on the wall putting braces on jungle animals. And then he had a picture of himself as an orthodontist putting braces on himself dressed as Superman. He’d always bring up Dizzy Gillespie, and I’d always be so resentful, because I was like, you’re the reason I can’t play.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“I have an indentation in my chest, like a slope. They had a procedure. They’re like, we can put a metal pole behind your sternum and snap this slope out so that it’s not concave anymore. But we might hit your heart. And I didn’t do that either.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“Now I’m more, I’ll listen to Ella Fitzgerald or something that doesn’t feel like math problems. If you feel like you’re naturally a cerebral person and your brain’s always crowded with thoughts, bebop just seems like you’re doubling down.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“I wanted to be a jazz musician when I was a kid, and I used to practice all the time, and then I got braces and I couldn’t really play anymore, so I just had all this free time when I used to be practicing trumpet. And so I just, on a whim, took an improv class up in New York at Upright Citizens Brigade, and then I just really loved it.” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018)
“I thought I was gonna be a musician, when I was a kid. I played trumpet. And then I got braces and I couldn’t really play anymore. And it opened up all this free time, when I used to be practicing trumpet, ’cause I would practice hours and hours. And then I started taking improv classes, just sort of as a lark. And I really liked it.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)

On Acting & Craft

“That’s my religion. I really believe that when you’re making stories, if I can love the character enough when I’m writing it with my writing partner, Brandon Gardner, then they become real to me.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“I think it’s really important to segregate the marketplace of the entertainment industry from the act of creative engagement, because the marketplace is cold and indifferent at best, but the impulse that exists in you to create things is sacred.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“It is only your job to stay open. You don’t even have to believe in your work. It’s not for us to decide the value of it.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“It’s your job to stay open, because you have essentially a flame in you that is unique to you. And if you do not stay open, it will be lost.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“Don’t evaluate the worth of your work by the kind of public response or the financials.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“I treat the set where I’m acting as a film school. People will give you the world. I asked all the people who I work with who I admire for their advice. If you can teach yourself enough technical stuff that you can advocate for what you know you need. You don’t have to be an expert about every little detail, but you have to know enough to be able to communicate with people who are technicians.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“Once people know they’re safe, and once people know that you want to see them, they’ll show you the most delicate, beautiful stuff. But they have to know that you want to see it and that you’re not going to handle it carelessly.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“The map you have in your head about how it’s supposed to play out is the enemy of the scene, because then you’re just trying to hit your own preconception. You’re trying to reenact a performance that never even happened. And no one wants to see a reenactment.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“When I’m doing my best work, I’m just engaged with the other person and the circumstances of the scene and playing and coming up with shit. But some days there’s just that satellite, you’re orbiting yourself taking constant little snapshots and sending them back for evaluation, and that is not a good place to be acting from.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 1, June 2015)
“The transition moments were as funny to me as the knockdown drag out comedy pieces.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 2, June 9, 2015)
“One thing that I think is so cool about television is it’s an ongoing conversation between the writers and the actors, at least on a comedy. They’ll try something, you’ll take that and run with it in whatever direction you’re interested in. Then they’ll take what you did and incorporate it in the next episode.” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018)
“I feel like I’ve learned from him that sometimes the way to best set yourself up for a good scene isn’t actually to hunker down. It’s to just stay loose and stay present and stay playful.” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018) (on Thomas Middleditch)
“I think it’s a sign of real confidence to be collaborative. The person who can allow for the unexpected is obviously the most confident person in the room.” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018)
“You can’t be precious. You can have your ideas about how things should be, but if you’re too rigid or too tied to your own technique, I don’t think it works.” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018)
“The most beautiful parts of people I find are when they’re self-forgetful. When they’re not trying to manage your experience of them, when they’re just lost to an experience themselves.” (Salon Talks, February 17, 2020)
“There’s a Cherry Jones quote that I love so much where she says theater is where we comfort each other with our shortcomings.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023) (relaying Cherry Jones)
“I remember Will Arnett would do this thing where he would sort of start improvising in between takes. And then when they would call action, it’s sort of like just continue. It was like he was keeping it simmering or something.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“The way I thought about it was, I think he’s sort of like a friendly nihilist. He’s someone who really doesn’t believe in anything at all, except to try to be nice to people. And his world view is so askew that when he tries to be comforting to people in distressing situations, it makes them feel catastrophically worse.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“The teacher really said, ‘Look out the window. See those people down there? They don’t have to be sensitive in the way that we’re sensitive.’ It was like the worst acting advice in the world, which is, erect an ego-based barrier between you and the actual people of the Earth. It was so crazy.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“He describes it as making a chicken stock, where you pour in all of these ingredients and then you boil it down, and then you pour in even more ingredients. Armando doesn’t have any marks. There’s no real blocking, and you can go wherever you want, and you can say whatever you want.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020) (on Armando Iannucci)
“I have a friend who’s an acting teacher named [Anya Saffir], who said, if you could remove all the social conditioning and repression and whatever else, most people are always on the verge of laughing or crying. You’re always sort of hovering on the precipice of one of those things.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024) (relaying Anya Saffir; same coach named in Office Ladies #187)
“There’s a George Saunders book about writing. My friend Brandon Gardner, who I write everything we work on together with, told me that George Saunders says that if you’re outlining, it’s almost like if you went on a date with index cards with things you were going to say. It cuts you off from the present moment so that you’re not actually in a flow.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024) (relaying George Saunders, via Brandon Gardner)
“Attention is how love expresses itself… the amount of attention and focus and care that they put into things that are largely not, no one’s getting rich off of stop motion, but they just care about it.” (The Three Questions with Andy Richter, June 24, 2024)

Other Minds, Language & the Uncanny

“The interior experience has at times been so full of strange horror because of the obsessive compulsive stuff. I sort of operate now under the assumption that everyone has an inner life that may not bear much of a resemblance to their outer life.” (Take Your Shoes Off with Rick Glassman #258, June 5, 2024)
“Someone said to me, what if what I see when I say green is… your green is my red? But language prevents us from, and it threw me into a depression. We’re all siloed in our own language prisons.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“I think the scariest thing would be to wake up next to you and find you, but your eyes are slightly further apart, or like your nose is half an inch longer. Just you, but plus some undeniable thing that can’t be accounted for. That to me just seems like a nightmare.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)

Persona, Reinvention & Performing Yourself

“I think that dogs are basically people. I make very little distinction between the two of them. I consider my dog more or less a person.” (In the Know, COVE Podcast #31, January 23, 2024)
“I have road rage. In my life I try to be a kind person and treat people with respect, but the second I get behind the wheel, that all goes out the window and I become a true ghoul, a demon.” (In the Know, COVE Podcast #31, January 23, 2024)
“I don’t have Twitter. I don’t have any social media. But you can’t totally not participate in this stuff, because it has an effect.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 2, June 9, 2015)
“It used to be over a few years we’ll build you up and then over a few years we’ll crash you. Now it’s day to day, week to week.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 2, June 9, 2015)
“There’s a RuPaul quote that I really like, which is, ‘We’re all born naked. The rest is just drag.’ Everyone pretends they’re an adult, but there’s no adults. There’s no structure.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020) (quoting RuPaul)
“[Esther Perel] in one of these books talked about how people who have affairs aren’t having affairs because they’re sick of their partner. It’s that they’re sick of the version of themselves that they are with their partner. Which I thought was interesting.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024) (relaying Esther Perel)
“I feel periodically that I’ll have the feeling of wanting to be a different person, and I will look to accessories to achieve that transformation. It’s such a slam dunk for capitalism. I guess that the impulse for personal growth immediately off ramps to [Shopify].” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“I think I like enticement maybe more than contentment. [Jasmine], to me, that is like the smell of a crush, where when you walk past jasmine, you just want to get closer and closer. You want to get into the center of the thing, but you can’t. I remember from seventh grade [asymptotes], where the line is always getting closer and closer. And I think that’s like a crush. It’s the [unrealizable].” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“I don’t do that many podcasts, partly because I feel shy and partly because I feel like I’m not sure which version of myself I’m supposed to bring.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“[My therapist] was like, when you go out onto one of these shows, just look at the host in the eye and try and find something lovable about them, because then you can have a moment of human warmth that exists on television. It’s not going to change the world, but it’ll be a nice little moment. And not allowing the noise of my own self consciousness to drown out the kind of little kid versions of me or other people [is] something I try to do.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024) (relaying his therapist)
“I think more I like the idea of being a jazz musician. Like I was like, that’ll tell me who I am. I don’t need to have my own tastes or preferences or beliefs. It’s all imported from jazz. You want to just backload a whole persona onto yourself.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“I used to wear a fedora. One time I was walking down the street wearing this fedora in New York, and a guy drove up, rolled down his passenger side window, and just went, ‘lose the hat,’ and then drove away. And I took it off and I never wore it again.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“One year I learned the words to ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ and I choreographed a dance and I got four of my friends to be essentially accessories in my costume. I bullied my friends into being backup dancers. They got candy, but I was looking for something bigger than candy.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“I don’t think I’ve ever been more confident than I was in middle school going into high school, the period most people describe as the worst. I felt bulletproof. I was walking around in a hat doing disco dances. But it didn’t go that deep. You haven’t really earned your personality.” (WTF with Marc Maron #597, April 26, 2015)
“For me, pole dancing isn’t finding my sexuality or being sexy. I like being strong, and I like being impressive, and I like dropping into splits. To me, sexy is strong.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“Pygmy, as in someone who is self-consciously quirky as a way of differentiating themselves from the masses, so that people are like, oh, she’s interesting. I’m going to feign a casual nonchalance while underneath I’m desperate for your approval and the approval of everybody here.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“I always buy sweaters that absorb and repel any sexuality coming my way.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“Bobby Moynihan once described someone’s body as looking like a lowercase B, where it’s all thin and gangly up top, but then a little paunch. I do feel like a lowercase B body. Someone described someone as being like a Daddy Longlegs, where there’s just this little disk of cerebral energy and then legs. That’s how I feel too.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“Have you ever done a monolog or an interview and then had that vulnerability hangover, where you’re like, I didn’t want to talk about that, but I did?” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)

Stories as Connection

“I’ve often felt more known and understood and seen, paradoxically, in a dark room with a bunch of strangers, with light and shadows flickering across the screen, with people who are long dead often.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“Stories tunnel under all that barbed wire, and you can get to people fast and you can be gotten to fast.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“Being reached in that way is so sacred. Those are lifesaving moments. Those are life-giving moments.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“It feels like a way of reaching past language and past all of these faltering tools we have to connect with each other, to go straight soul to soul basically.” (In the Know, COVE Podcast #31, January 23, 2024)
“The most sure fire way I know to tunnel under all of the barriers is art, physical touch, and certain kinds of conversations that aren’t necessarily even about what you’re saying explicitly, but the energetic loop that exists between the two of you. A lot of my most intimate experiences have been in audiences. I feel so close to these people I’ve never even met before, but I feel so profoundly understood and understanding of [them].” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“Something that I like about stories is that sometimes they can show that people are more than one thing, that they’re not just one identity.” (I Said No Gifts! with Bridger Winegar, February 1, 2024)
“People have a tendency to winnow themselves down to one thing, or to winnow each other down to one thing, this reductive identity thing. Something that I always look for in stories and try to include is the contradictory bird’s nest of a person.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“One thing that’s so cool about stop motion is because each character is played by 30 different animators plus the voice actor, there’s a multifacetedness that’s bred into the process. You get all of these different people’s little ticks and imaginations and facial features.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)

The Office, Silicon Valley & Satire

“Silicon Valley is maybe the best job I’ve ever had, so I feel actually kind of like whatever my version of giddy is.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 1, June 2015)
“I really love the guys I work with, not in the obligatory Hollywood way, in a real way. It’s the most generous cast. People set each other up and give each other space and are excited for each other to do well in scenes.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 1, June 2015)
“They are painstaking about the writing. They do a million drafts and they perfect it, and we shoot the writing, but they also let us improvise a lot.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 1, June 2015)
“People don’t mind being ridiculed if you’re ridiculing them in a way that feels true to them, because then it means that you paid attention. If you’re kind of ridiculous because of this hyper-specific thing that I noticed, it means that you really looked at that person, that world.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 1, June 2015)
“HBO is to some degree exempt from the ratings frenzy, so you can do things that you couldn’t do if you had to appeal to the broadest possible audience.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 1, June 2015)
“After the first season, I was like, this has been such a treat to shoot, but I have no idea whether it will have any audience, about such a niche world.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 2, June 9, 2015)
“I feel like Mike Judge satirizes things in a way that isn’t dehumanizing to the subjects of the satire. The point of view in Mike Judge stuff to me seems like, aren’t we all idiots, as opposed to, aren’t these people fucking idiots?” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 2, June 9, 2015)
“There’s something about Mike Judge that I like, which is that when he satirizes something, he makes fun of it in a way that doesn’t feel like he’s making fun of it from on high. It doesn’t feel like he’s sneering or looking down on the characters. The general attitude seems to be kind of like, aren’t we all ridiculous?” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018)
“It was such a relief to be able to play someone who is so motherly and hopefully warm to the other characters.” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018) (on Jared)
“Initially in the pilot, Jared, there wasn’t much to him. He wasn’t that funny. It was just kind of exposition.” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018)
“You’re basically a Jared. So I do think, yeah, parts of our personality naturally seep into the show.” (Off Camera with Sam Jones, Ep. 141, April 9, 2018) (recalling TJ Miller finding him cross-legged on a yoga mat, reading a purple journal of affirmations with candles lit, listening to the Indigo Girls)
“The level of kindness and hospitality that was extended to me on that show was bizarre. It was like the photo negative of what happened to the character Gabe. I was already so fragile and terrified, and I wanted so desperately to do a good job. And to be met with that kind of generosity of spirit was, I think, formative for me.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“I felt like the joke of Gabe was that he’s all ego. He’s so fragile that everything becomes an exercise in ego. And after playing that, I was kind of interested in the opposite joke, which is, what if there was someone who was born with an almost pathological lack of ego, where all they care about is other people?” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“There are all of these apps that are basically the assistive devices for people who are socially inept in some way. But now they’ve become monetized and have proliferated in such a way that we are now living in the coping strategies of a few nerds.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“I think Mike doesn’t feel better than the people he satirizes. It’s not scornful. The point of view of a lot of the stuff he’s made is kind of, aren’t we all ridiculous? And aren’t these systems depressing?” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“Before he made Office Space, he had an office job which he hated. But he felt lucky to have it, which made him feel even worse. In other words, he didn’t think he was too good for it.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020) (on Mike Judge)
“I passed a house, and in the front yard there was a sign that said ‘Defund the police.’ Then right next to it was an ADT home security decal advertising that they have armed guards on patrol. And then I felt very smug about it. And then I went to go get my $19 matcha and was my own hellish version of the same person I was just looking down on.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“There’s so much cosmetic progressive ideology where it’s a personal enhancement as opposed to a commitment that you’re making to action. It’s a way of beautifying yourself, but you never really walk the walk. If you look at my credit card statements and my journal entries, there’s a terrible disparity between what I supposedly care about and what I swipe my card on.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“I find myself in these kind of sanctimonious fits. And then I realize that just as my voice gets shriller and louder and I get more and more on soapbox after soapbox, I’m like, I’m so full of shit.” (The Three Questions with Andy Richter, June 24, 2024)

Vulnerability, Imposter Syndrome & Gratitude

“But when you’re real, you can’t be ugly except [for] the people who don’t understand. And isn’t that a hell of a passage? That to me is what I believe in.” (Tribeca Storytelling Summit, June 6, 2026)
“I’ve been able to just do things that I like. I haven’t done anything in a sort of mercenary or strategic way, and so far it’s led to modest progress.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 1, June 2015)
“If your whole life becomes about extrinsic validation, then you’re at the mercy of this crazy, unpredictable tide.” (DP/30: Silicon Valley, Part 2, June 9, 2015)
“I felt like I won a contest. You win a raffle and you can do a walk on on a TV show.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“It’s so isolating to aspire to something. I felt comforted by your vulnerability and by your ownership of that vulnerability, because I felt so vulnerable. Expose the the [sic] gap between public perception and interior experience, that for me was really helpful.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“That’s what it feels like to be a person, is to be just like a prolonged ice slip that seems to never stop. And when it turns out good, it’s just like humans evading disaster. It’s like the best.” (Office Ladies #187, November 29, 2023)
“I remember taking off from JFK and flying over New York, on the way to London, and just feeling dizzy with gratitude. I would just wander around the streets of London crying, basically, tears running down my face, because it was so beyond anything I had ever imagined for myself.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“I sort of made my own little patchwork conservatory. Because it’s going back to that feeling of fraudulence. I was just like, I need to have some sort of qualifications here, because otherwise I’m gonna totally be horrible.” (Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, February 22, 2020)
“It’s a mad lib where the answer is always I suck, I’m terrible, I’m the worst, I’m unlovable.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“It’s not a meritocracy. I don’t have this job because there was no one better for it. At some point I was just like, well, I got the winning scratch off, so I better spend the money and enjoy it. It’s also an argument for trying to be gracious and help other people get opportunities.” (Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer, March 15, 2024)
“Smart is way overrated. I’ve met tons of people who are smarter than me, who probably have a much higher IQ. I don’t credit smart with a lot.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“I put everybody else on a pedestal. As you know, you degrade yourself when you do that. I was constantly not thinking that much of myself and thinking that these other people were gods.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“I also think that reverence isolates both the revered and the reverencer.” (Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, March 11, 2024)
“My sense of my own fraudulence is paralyzing me, and it’s a kind of self involvement.” (The Three Questions with Andy Richter, June 24, 2024)
“I am so obsessed with my own shortcomings that it’s making the shortcomings even worse.” (The Three Questions with Andy Richter, June 24, 2024)
“I think just making friends with your soft kind of underbelly, I think is a big deal in creative or not.” (The Three Questions with Andy Richter, June 24, 2024)