Jay Roach Quotes

Other than friends and family, my favorite things are New York and stand-up. I love doing comedy in New York - I can do way more stand-up here than in Los Angeles.

Comedy is a wonderful device for distance that allows us to look at what we're talking about with some degree of distance and hopefully with a bit more perspective and honesty. With many exceptions, a movie with no jokes is far less appealing to me.

When a New Yorker looks like he has a suntan, it's probably rust.

Getting on a plane, I told the ticket lady, "Send one of my bags to New York, send one to Los Angeles, and send one to Miami." She said, "We can't do that!" I told her, "You did it last week!"

I could go to L.A. for limited amounts of time, but I like New York too much. I like seasons. I like fall.

It was so cold in New York City today that the Statue of Liberty had her torch under her dress.

One time my whole family played hide and seek. They found my mother in Pittsburgh!

Humor is the healthy way of feeling "distance" between one's self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one's problem with perspective.

I certainly didn't have New York Jewish humor. But I was in three Mel Brooks films so people thought I was a connoisseur of New York Jewish humor.

The sky is so clear today you can see all the way to Missouri.

A doctor says to a man, "You want to improve your love life? You need to get some exercise. Run ten miles a day." Two weeks later, the man called the doctor. The doctor says, "How is your love life since you have been running?" "I don't know, I'm 140 miles away!"

There was always something immensely comic to her in the thought of living elsewhere than New York. She could not regard as serious proposals that she share a western residence.

It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.

I'm not crazy impressed with New York. I mean, I don't buy into that whole thing: Everyone in New York is all sophisticated, and they're into art and sophisticated things, and everyone in L.A. is just shallow entertainment people. I think people are just shallow across the board.

I just thought everybody lived around abandoned buildings and crack-heads, ... I lived in the ghetto until I was like 19. I came to Los Angeles, stayed at hotels and stuff. When I got back and I saw what my neighborhood looked like, I started getting scared.

There are two million interesting people in New York and only seventy-eight in Los Angeles.

I figured if I could put together being funny about stuff and actual events, maybe I could do something that wasn't being done much. Because the reporters that I met out there were funny, and they had hilarious stories that just didn't fit in the AP/UPI/New York Times foreign-correspondent style. They couldn't use the things they had. But I could.

I'm living in Los Angeles for a couple of years. I've been a gypsy for quite a while. It'll come to an end. I'm going to come back to New York.

Los Angeles is where you have to be if you want to be an actor. You have no choice. You go there or New York. I flipped a coin about it. It came up New York, so I flipped again. When you're starting out to be an actor, who wants to go where it's cold and miserable and be poor there?

There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

I know a member of one of New York's first families (first as you drive up Tenth Avenue)

Unusual weather for New York City. Today it was 68 and foggy. No, wait a minute, that's me. I'm sorry, that's me.

I really like the stuff that is very absurd and very real at the same time. I think Anton Chekhov is the greatest comedy writer of all time. I think he would make a great addition to The Office staff. If you look through Chekhov plays there is a lot of awkward pauses in there. His mixture of pathos, absurdity, truthfulness and whimsy is just mixed together perfectly.

The arresting officer, who I had literally known, all my life. You know what I mean? This guy lived four doors down the street me, in a town of less than four hundred people. *We've met.* Now, he takes me to jail, and he asks me if I have any aliases. And I was just being a smartass, and I said, "Yeah. They call me, "Tater Salad!" Seventeen years later, I'm handcuffed on a bench in New York with blood coming out of my nose, and this cop goes, "Are you Ron 'Tater Salad' White?"

Comedy distances pain, but leaves signs of it everywhere.