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 wasn’t. It was really frustrating for me because I desired that so much. Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
Directing your first film is like showing up to the field trip in seventh grade, getting on the bus, and making an announcement, ‘So today I’m driving the bus.’ And everybody’s like, ‘What?’ And you’re like, ‘I’m gonna drive the bus.’ And they’re like, ‘But you don’t know how to drive the bus.’ Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
Once you start writing something obsessively, it’s almost like someone has to rip it from your hands in order for you to put it down. Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
I’m unable to do the thing that Broadway actors do in plays, sometimes for years. The same exact blocking, the same exact lines. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with that. Every night I’m looking for ways to try something else. Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
The thing with film is that it’s so wide-reaching compared to comedy. When I release my comedy special, half a million people will see it. If I release a movie, five to ten million people will see it. Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
It’s a difficult line to tread, where sometimes you go to the movies or you watch someone do publicity for movies or TV shows, and they do all the jokes that are good in the promotion of it, and you see the movie, and you’re like, ‘I kind of get it already. I’m not that psyched about it.’ Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
I would be so mad if I saw something called a memoir, and then it was Mike Birbiglia. It would be so infuriating. It’s like, ‘Who is this guy, and why does he have a memoir?’ David Letterman could write a memoir. Joan Rivers could. I’m just a nobody. I’m a comedian and a writer. Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
I was a screenwriting major at Georgetown, and I was in class with some really strong writers like Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote ‘The Dark Knight’ with Chris, his brother. He wrote ‘The Prestige,’ the story for ‘Memento.’ Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
As a comedian, you want people to like you. That’s part of why you’re 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. Mike Birbiglia Read Quote
