Mike Birbiglia Quotes

Saturday night is perfect for writers because other people have plans.

~ Mike Birbiglia

...And so we go and I meet his parents. And it's a very strange thing meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. Part of you is angry for obvious reasons and part of you still wants to make a good impression. On a side note, they seemed in perfect health.

~ Mike Birbiglia

Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.

~ Mike Birbiglia

I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.

~ Mike Birbiglia

I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.

~ Mike Birbiglia

They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.

~ Mike Birbiglia

Dopamine is a chemical released in your brain and your body when you sleep that paralyzes your body so you don't act out your dreams.

~ Mike Birbiglia

I feel that marriage can lead to the ultimate rejection and failure and divorce and things we all fear.

~ Mike Birbiglia

Starbucks is the last public space with chairs. It's a shower for homeless people. And it's a place you can write all day. The baristas don't glare at you. They don't even look at you.

~ Mike Birbiglia

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

I love pizza. I want to marry it, but it would just be to eat her family at the wedding.

~ Mike Birbiglia

There's something about small venues that's amazing for developing material. It's almost like you can not only hear people's response, but you can understand it. In bigger venues you lose that, but you gain this sense of camaraderie in the audience.

~ 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

You can't go to medical school and come out and be like, 'I'm going to be a dog catcher.' That would be so pointless.

~ Mike Birbiglia

I'm generally so disoriented during the week about what I'm doing and where I am - I travel a lot - that when I'm home on a Sunday, I typically try to sleep in as much as I can.

~ Mike Birbiglia

Directing a movie is a little bit like being back in student government and putting on the homecoming dance. You're like, 'You put up the streamers, and you hire the DJ, and you get the punch bowl.' Some people are just like, 'This dance sucks.' And you're like, 'No no, this dance is awesome!' You have to be really positive.

~ Mike Birbiglia

I never looked at my parents' marriage or really anyone who had been married more than 30 years and thought, 'I gotta get me some of that!'

~ Mike Birbiglia

I've actually always wanted to write like a one-person show that was sort of a romantic comedy - a show that was kind of cynical about romance and marriage but ultimately embraced it. Because I feel like comedy is always cynical, inherently, because it's contrarian.

~ Mike Birbiglia

Someone said to me at a party once, 'Oh, yeah, you're a comedian? Then how come you're not funny now?' And I just wanted to say, 'Well, I'm just going to take this conversation we're having and then repeat that to strangers, and then that's the joke. You're the joke later.'

~ Mike Birbiglia

It sounds so nerdy and pathetic, but what I always do on Sunday afternoon is bring my inbox down to zero, which is so sad. But e-mail has become like homework for adults. I'll have 141 messages from people who will be offended if I don't write back.

~ Mike Birbiglia

My first car was, as depicted in 'Sleepwalk with Me,' my mother's '92 Volvo station wagon that had 80,000 miles on it, and I had put 40,000 miles on it, so by the time it retired it had 120,000, and I basically killed it. It served me well, and my mechanic was always very angry with me because I just didn't properly care for it.

~ Mike Birbiglia

I think that my regrets mostly have to do with my relationship with my ex-girlfriend. Every once in a while, you get those flashback memories of conversations you had with your exes, and you just, like, wince when you're walking down the street. Something occurs to you, 'Oh, no, I said that.'

~ Mike Birbiglia

Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase 'Don't tell anyone.' But not about creepy things. I don't want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like, I wouldn't make the soccer team, and my father would say, 'Don't tell anyone.'

~ Mike Birbiglia

My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

~ Mike Birbiglia