Kumail Nanjiani Quotes

#1. My stories take three or four months to fix, and it's not magical of a process. Ultimately it's a boring, difficult process. I write everything out, and then the parts I think are funny I put in bold. Then I go perform it. Then the parts that aren't funny, I unbold them.

#2. You can get stuck in the trap of reading your YouTube comments all the time. Sometimes I regret it. Not everyone is going to love you. And for some reason, stand-up has this thing where everyone thinks they can do it. So everyone thinks they're an expert.

#3. I moved to New York first and was really apprehensive about moving to L.A., but I really, really like it.

#4. Philosophy is problem-solving. There's a philosophical problem, and then you try to solve it by approaching it from different angles and seeing what way works. That's what comedy is: you have a topic and you try to just hit it as many different ways as you can.

#5. When I started working on 'Michael And Michael,' it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone.

#6. It wasn't until I moved to New York that I decided to make a conscious effort to be myself.

#7. On stage I just have to be myself. In acting you have to be so many other people.

#8. Living in Pakistan, you didn't have a sense of how huge and varied America was, geographically.

#9. Just because you saw a vampire doesn't mean that a snowman or a Loch Ness Monster also exists.

#10. I thought of America as this crazy, happy, exciting place where everybody's rich and there's stuff everywhere. Compared to Pakistan, it's not untrue.

#11. I was extremely shy and had a terrible fear of public speaking. But I had fallen in love with stand-up.

#12. Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

#13. I approximated the Black Friday experience at home by hurling myself into a wall a number of times and then ordering online.

#14. I would say I try to make my comedy really personal. I try to tell stories that happened to me, experiences from my life.

#15. I love constructive criticism. I love getting notes when I'm acting. I love them telling me what to do. I don't always agree with it, but I really need it.

#16. I never really got into game shows. The easiest one is 'Wheel Of Fortune' because you just have to know words, and for the most part everyone knows words.

#17. I love, love, love the street-cart food. Gyros are like a meat-flavored fruit roll-up. A meat roll-up.

#18. If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

#19. When generally people make race-based jokes to me - even if they're not technically racist, they're sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever - on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context.

#20. It's not like I listened to music and then stopped. I still don't have a real appreciation for music because I didn't really start listening to it until my 20s.

#21. The worst job I ever had was an office job that I had for six years, and that's nothing against the people who I was surrounded by, because they were wonderful people.

#22. We only hear success stories. You don't hear about the hundreds and hundreds - the overwhelming majority that don't go anywhere. This is a more realistic portrayal of what happens in startups.

#23. The whole religion of Islam is based on reward and punishment and reward and punishment, and it becomes a part of how you think of everything. Even yourself.

#24. I think, you know, a lot of the business of comedy is taking your personal experiences and making them relatable to other people.

#25. I think being funny had something to do with feeling like an outsider, not feeling cool - insecurity.

#26. I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

#27. The plan was always to come to America, because Pakistan's a scary place. They don't have religious freedom. It's very poor, and there's a lot of violence and corruption.