Kumail Nanjiani Quotations

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

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.

Im from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor.

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

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.

I stay home. It's the best place to be alone. There is hardly any walk-through traffic.

You really need to have that discipline. It's not even discipline. I just put down these rules. It's not like a vague, 'Motivate yourself!' and do something. Its specific hours set aside every day for certain things.

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia is kind of weird. I feel it's lame to put up my own page, but I desperately want someone else to do it.

Honestly, I would love to be friends with Fox Mulder on 'The X-Files.' That's almost a little too obvious, but that would be my answer. I'd love to hang out with him.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I was on this path to becoming a computer-science guy, but I didn't like it. I got no joy from it. It was very, very scary. It was suffocating to think that I was just going to do this thing for the rest of my life.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I am a very nerdy guy. I understand that it's easier to cast me as a nerdy guy than an action star - although I would love to be an action star!

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

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

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.

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.

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.