Kathryn Hahn Quotes

Stand-up comics reflect less of a visual humor and more of a commentary.

Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.

I grew up loving David Letterman and Pee-wee Herman, but as far as live performance comedy, all I knew were the Jerry Seinfeld-type comedians of the world, and that's what I thought live performance comedy was all about.

In truth, I have always been amazed by a group of people who all work toward putting one person's vision forward - that's an interesting story for me.

Greg Berlanti, David Nutter, Andrew Kreisberg and Marc Guggenheim are the people I wanted to work with. They're smart, they're funny, they're cool, they're edgy.

I like to describe my stuff as observational comedy.

It really helps a comedian to be an outsider.

Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.

If you like quick put-downs and aggressive interactions with the audience, you will probably not enjoy the rambles of an unusual character act making jokes about cats for an hour.

The key is to work with people who are passionate about storytelling and who have a similar sensibility of the type and nature of the stories that you want to tell.

Great Canadian comics are often outsiders and insiders at the same time. That's a great perspective for a comedian.

I'm not one of those kind of people who does the observational 'Hey, don't you hate it when you're at the grocery store and the line's long and the cash register starts taking too long.' I don't really do that kind of stuff. I'm heavy on persona, and I do a lot of interacting with the audience.

Movies are the work of a collective conscious. It takes 500-800 people on a movie to complete a vision.

Every now and then I have to teach directing. The thing about the theatre is that the most important thing you can do as a director is to make sure that everybody is in the same world - you have to create the world and make sure everyone buys into it.

The treasure of a writer is to maintain their own style.

Every director's so different. Everybody has their own modus operandi and I love getting to know different directors in the way they work. David O. Russell is very exciting to be with because he's got a mind like quicksilver.

I like George Carlin's jokes. I like his humor. He's one of my heroes, and I like what he did with talking about everyday things.

Sharing the same vision for what's on the page is always a good idea. The director's job is to establish what that is and make sure that everyone sticks to it when it comes down to actually executing it. Establishing what the vision is and being able to stick to it is the job, and everyone should be on the same page going in.

Comedy taste changes. It only changes slightly, but there's always a different angle, a different attitude.

It was a very critical moment for me when I began working with David Cronenberg and seeing this amazing director and creator choose to base himself out of Toronto.

Every filmmaker imbues a movie with their own point of view.

My standup is observational, but it's self-observational, and it's self-deprecating, definitely.

I was always good at being observationally funny - like, contributing something funny to the conversation.

It helps to see the world through a different lens, and that's what we wanted to do with Instagram. We wanted to give everyone the same feeling of discovering the world around you through a different lens.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.