Kumail Nanjiani Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

It really helped to have someone whose taste I really trusted who I knew was really smart and a really good writer. Sometimes I find it hard to judge my own work so it was good to have someone who could look at it. It was like, "Oh, she likes it, then it's good."

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

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

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