Steve Zissis Quotes

I approach everything the same. I try to make it as real as possible, whether you gotta make people laugh or make people cry, it's always the same approach for me. But if I start doing pratfalls, somebody please pull the plug on me.

That's what it is: a 'Harold & Kumar' movie is a romance between two best friends.

You can't just play crazy. It makes you push yourself to stay in the realm of reality. And when you do that, it's a lot funnier. That's my favorite, when you think it's a real strange person and not just someone being wacky.

You can't really control how people are going to feel about you; all you can really do is be yourself. Because if you seduce somebody, and you seduce them by pretending to be a certain way, once they are seduced they are going to find that you are not that way. And then you have to maintain an image that's not real, so you really screw yourself. The best is to be yourself and hope they like you.

We're all real people with moments of intense honesty and pathos and humanity. We all experience that, whether you're comedic or not.

Even the people who do great jokes, [it's] always coming out of a very real place.

A lot of people play single to work some angle. I'm always about keeping it real. If that's how I'm living, that's how I'm living.

I don't like theatrical actors and actresses. I like people that talk like real human beings.

I don't do comedy. I think if a situation is funny you just play it for real and if it's funny, it's funny.

I think it's really nice to have an authenticity, it's a huge source for us to be able to lean on people who have that knowledge.

We have so much access to one another through technology and everything else, that we're very much used to people being real. When folks go on TV and they're basically acting - if they were good actors they'd be acting and paid for it for a living, but they're not good actors. When we see bad acting, it doesn't look like bad acting, it looks weird, and we are turned off by it. I'm not talking about anybody in particular, that's just politics right now. This generation, I feel like, has incredible bullshit detectors.

I don't pretend to be perfect. I want people to see me as I am.

I hear people talk in my head and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real. That person wouldn't wear that. That person wouldn't say that. She can't afford to live like that. All that bullshit that so many movies have in them. I don't want to see that.

A role model is an imperfect person, not a perfect person, because that's who we are as real people.

[Billie Holiday] was keeping it super real, and you can feel that to this day. Everything that she sang, she believed in. So I had to pick songs that I felt the same about.

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.

We think sometimes we're only drawn to the good, but we're actually drawn to the authentic. We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties

I think the best way people can connect to you is by being real

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.

In art as in politics we must deal with people as they are not as we wish them to be. Only by working with the real can you get closer to the ideal.

I might tell a story about somebody else, but I don't sit there and do a story about somebody snitching on me selling coke because people know I didn't sell coke. So I just try to keep it real but still try to do it in a creative way.

What I admire is people who are grounded and resistant to all kinds of whisperings. Kimi Raikkonen, for example. You may like him or not, but he lives his way. He does the things he has identified as worthy for him and he is not trying to be everybody’s darling. At least he doesn’t give that impression. He is straightforward and honest and he tells you if he has a bad day. Period. He is real. He’s not political. He’s never up to something. If he doesn’t want to tell you something he will say so and not hum and haw. He doesn’t beat around the bush, never coming to the point.

I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life.

I'm just flowing through, when I see things, I talk about 'em. And it's cool. I don't want any title. I just say what I say, and hopefully somebody gets it. I'm not perfect, and I'm just here and trying to make a dollar, and being real at the same time.