Mike Birbiglia Quotes

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Mike Birbiglia

Profession : Comedian

Birth : June 20, 1978

When I was in college, I wanted to write for 'Late Night With Conan O'Brien,' and I was an intern there.

Mike Birbiglia

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

Mike Birbiglia

I always try to attack the most honest issues I can in my comedy.

Mike Birbiglia

I just like, when you look at people who have long careers in film, they're able to make films that are far away from themselves, because they're metaphorical. It creates more opportunities, I think.

Mike Birbiglia

Making a film is beyond exciting. It's so exciting, it's exhausting.

Mike Birbiglia

Pain is funnier than love.

Mike Birbiglia

I was very much a late bloomer. That's not to say that girls didn't express interest in me from time to time, but I just, I did not know how to respond to that.

Mike Birbiglia

I love Broadway shows.

Mike Birbiglia

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

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

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

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

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

You get to the end of something, you're laughing, you're like, 'That's funny, and that's funny,' and then you get to the end, and the credits come down, and you're like, 'That's it?! That's the whole thing?! You had me here for that?!' I just don't want to do that.

Mike Birbiglia

There are comedians who focus on everything that is external. They focus on politics and the news, what's going on in that city and that night.

Mike Birbiglia

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

I've become good friends with Lena Dunham, and the thing I had in common with Lena when I was 24 is I was as ambitious as she was. What we don't have in common is that I was not as talented. My voice was not as clearly defined.

Mike Birbiglia

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

I got out of school in 2000, and I always wanted to be on 'This American Life,' since I first started telling stories. And that, I mean, that show is a little bit of a fortress. It's really hard to get stuff on that show.

Mike Birbiglia

I am intimidating no one in America. No one feels like they are below me in any way. They feel like they are absolutely either at or above my level and 100-percent comfortable talking to me.

Mike Birbiglia