Hasan Minhaj Quotes

I love making stuff. There's a joy in having the first molecule of an idea, then testing it in front of audiences at secret shows that people only know about the day before. I videotape those, study them, enjoy being in the character and figuring out the movie.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

I believe that acting in any medium is the same thing, it's discovering the truth in where you are.

Theater is about life, not about television or movies.

Acting is probably what I'm best at, but there are certain stories kind of rattling around in my head that I like the idea of developing over time.

In theater, there's a lot of work to do to build the characters. It's a great experience.

Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

Making 'Coraline' was one of the great filmmaking experiences of my life.

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

There's a tremendous amount to be gained from being a performer, and being an artist, and being an actor.

When you have the cast, the sets, the lights, an opera takes on its own life. I'm not one of those directors who marches in with a set of plans.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

It's all about story and character with me, and I don't care if the job is on daytime or prime time or the web. Hey, give me a good character and someone to listen, and I'll do my acting on a street corner.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.

I started in theater, and I love to go back to theater, just to have the experience and recharge my batteries, creatively.

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

I still really love acting. I find it really challenging. And I really love film; it's a lot of fun.

One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

I want to do better. I want to produce better stories. I want to do better plays.

I never dreamed that the little ditties I wrote about annoying customers or bagel recipes would turn into a full-length musical comedy. But a very wise person told me to 'write what you know'. So I did.