Nick Quotes
I guess there should be somewhere on the Internet that feels like a source of sacred truth. But Wikipedia sure isn't it.
As long as it's not an easy, outdated stereotype and it comes from an interesting or emotionally driven place, then anyone can be made fun of.
Go ahead and make up a ton of lies about me. That's way more interesting than pretending Wikipedia has any real information.
Like most lazy upper-middle-class kids, American Studies seemed like a fun way to use your knowledge of TV to get an A.
There's one theory that the funnier a comic is in his act, the more mind-numbingly boring he'll be when he's not holding a microphone.
A job is a job, and there are days that are going to be boring, or you have a boss you don't like, or people you work with.
Seinfeld has his way of telling jokes - and I'm not comparing myself to Seinfeld, his genius is observing the small details of everyday life and finding humor in it.
A lot of times, you're circling around a lot of things, and then you find that one person, or that little piece of dialogue, and it doesn't always have to be in person.
Robert Altman made that movie Kansas City about the jazz scene in the city, and we saw that band all together, and that was an amazing show. That's what I got into. I like jazz.
Music was not a big deal to me when I was in middle school. And then I slowly became a big jazz fan. Even more than concerts, a lot of my high school time was spent going to jazz clubs in the city.
I think that being on the road and doing more and more stand-up has allowed me to figure out... like, I don't think I'll ever be Bill Hicks, but I think I'm figuring out what my opinion is on things.
I feel like we have so many different ways to express ourselves now, and I relish, I feel very lucky to be doing comedy.
For me, the goal wasn't to turn the stand-up special on its head, but to do what I do specifically, and hopefully that reads as something new.
My first concert isn't that cool or ironic. I wish it had been like, "My first concert was the Backstreet Boys," but the first concert I went to, I think, was this band called The Samples.
In general in comedy, there are fewer people making a ton of money and a lot more people making a living. For me, the goal is just being able to make exactly the show I wanted to make.
Really, I just love doing comedy. Any form it takes is great, as long as I can keep doing it, you know? If I can do my show and 'The League' while also getting to do other bits, that's awesome.
The one place I've seen something really come together is in editing. Sometimes you can save pieces in a way that you're really shocked.
My thinking is, if we're setting out to make comedy in which nothing is off limits, then everybody is fair game.
I found, especially with stand-up, that if a premise works, you can make the joke work. If a premise doesn't work, you can't force it to.
We can't control it, and we've basically quit trying. People are going to talk, and people are going to lie.
As long as there are teenage girls, there will be boy bands. It's a question of how long it takes them to get their music together to come out.
The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.
A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see.
In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty.
Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.
That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."
When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.
There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee.
I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.
The war on terror is a fight that we did not start, but it is one that we shall finish.
Any veteran can tell you it is already hard enough to see a doctor down at the VA and get the health care they were promised when they signed up to serve this country.
You gotta be, like, a professional hippie. You need to make music because you love it.
And that doesn't cost any money, to have decent relationships and viable situations. What costs money is car chases and shoot-outs, so I always thought that the thing to work on was the characters.
I think one of the luxuries of being a filmmaker is that you can ask questions but not necessarily have to answer them. Certainly, if I was a politician I'd need to come up with some answers.
I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.
Later in life, suddenly, if you're an outsider, it's something to be celebrated, I think, rather than getting on people's nerves.
When I find a cover song that I like, I'll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it.
A devastating culmination of the elegant and the funky, a really sensational musician with enormous depth.