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

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

Jokes are so personal, and they bring us together in so many ways.

I couldn't recommend more that people put themselves in a situation where they can see a lot of work that they admire, and for free.

In some sense, Comedy Central has made their audience into comedy connoisseurs.

I end up talking about really mundane things with my fans, and then they're kind of like, 'This is boring. I want to go talk to somebody else.' I think I bore my fans to death by over-talking to them.

When I was in high school I saw Steven Wright, a brilliant one-liner comedian, and I thought: 'That's what I should do; I should write one-liners.' And I did. My first album is mostly one-liners.

I've read that Steven Wright's style was born out of genuine nervousness.

'Terminator 2' is so good. I love it.

You know the quickest way to get comedians to hate you? Do Letterman at age 24.

Comedy unites, it doesn't divide!

The moment I walk into a room, I have kind of like the Terminator's tracking system for where the food is, and I can get there immediately.

I love 'Bullets Over Broadway,' but I'm pretty sure Woody Allen hasn't killed somebody.

I am diagnosed with what's called 'REM behavior disorder.' As far as the disorder goes, there's no cure, but it's going pretty well as far as these things go. I see a sleep doctor, take medication, etc.

My last name has the word 'big' in it. It seems like a logical progression that if you shed away the Bir and the lia, I'll just be Big.

When I go to bed at night, I wear a sleeping bag. And for a long time, I wore mittens so that I couldn't open the sleeping bag.

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.

Creepy people do the things that decent people want to do, but have decided are not a great idea.

I would say that I love pizza so much that sometimes I eat pizza while I'm eating pizza. Like, I'm so content with myself with how it's going that I'm like, 'I should do this more,' not realizing that the mouth is full. I'm just cramming pizza into my mouth.

Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.

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.

When I started out, I really struggled as a comic because no one knew who I was, and sometimes I was telling stories, so it would take a while for people to get on board for things.

I think the thing I had to be careful about while writing a book was not to say anything that was revealing about other people that they would be uncomfortable with. I didn't want to make people angry - that's a real risk.

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.

Once you've made your first feature, you know what you can do wrong and how hard it is to shoot a feature. Before you do it, you just don't know how hard it is. Once you've done it, when you're writing a second one, it's almost like you're preparing, and it's almost holding you back.

Random people, celebrities of note come to your shows over the years, and I've had some really strange ones. Like the guy from Kiss. Gene Simmons has literally been in the audience at my shows, like, four times. I don't know if he knows me; he's just a big fan of comedy.

I sometimes think of not doing Twitter or Facebook anymore, but that's how people find their favorite bands and comedians.

One of my favourite movies is 'Annie Hall' because it's about the silver lining of the break-up.

Sometimes you'll have a heckler who's actually attempting to be supportive, but you don't realize it. Their way of expressing it is kind of confusing.

Pain is funnier than love.

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.'

The Comedy Central CDs combined with the TV specials are what led to my stuff being traded and passed around, and a lot more people knowing my jokes than I thought.

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.

I think serious situations actually make for the best kind of belly laughs. But they're also the hardest to convert into comedy at the outset.

Every comedian comes to a fork in the road where they have to decide if they're going to make jokes about other people or make jokes about themselves. I chose myself.

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.'

Essentially, retweets are like laughs.

The economy of film forces you to make choices.

If you're asked something on a movie set and you say 'I don't know,' you lose confidence in every department. What you need to say is 'I'll have that for you in five minutes.'

It used to be that if you got on 'The Tonight Show,' your career was made. Now, if you're on 'The Tonight Show,' maybe 14 more people show up to your gig in Tulsa.

I'm a comedian, and the other comedians are played by comedians, the same way that in 'Once' there are the musicians that hang out together.

I majored in screenwriting and playwriting in school - and wanted to make films as a career. But when I directed my first short in college - which was called 'Extras' - I lost thousands of dollars and made an unsatisfying and incomplete film.

I drank the Kool-Aid of being a network star. Once it didn't happen, I realized it wasn't the best version of my comedy.

When I moved to New York, I was wide-eyed. I was nice to everyone, which comedians hate.

Over the years, I managed to develop this comedy career, went from opening act to headliner at comedy clubs, to playing concert halls, and had an off-Broadway show with 'Sleepwalk With Me.'

I was completely unqualified to get into Harvard. But then I went to my interview for Harvard, and the woman asked, 'Why do you want to go here?' And I took out all of my comedy writing samples that I had done. I couldn't have been more delusional in terms of what I thought they wanted in a candidate for college.

I feel like being a door person was like college in a sense. I could watch comedy on a professional level seven nights a week without paying, and they would pay me a nominal amount of money to be there.

If I dream that I'm directing, it's not a film, it's like a commercial for cotton candy, and I've got four feet of cotton candy all around me that I've got to break through, like a brick wall or a fortress.

With a monologue, you can be unendingly elliptical.

Sometimes people say, 'You're the best at digressions.' And that's actually a real compliment to me.