Patton Oswalt > Quotes

“I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.”
― Patton Oswalt

“You’ve gotta respect everyone’s beliefs." No, you don’t. That’s what gets us in trouble. Look, you have to acknowledge everyone’s beliefs, and then you have to reserve the right to go: "That is fucking stupid. Are you kidding me?" I acknowledge that you believe that, that’s great, but I’m not going to respect it. I have an uncle that believes he saw Sasquatch. We do not believe him, nor do we respect him!”
― Patton Oswalt

“If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Zombies can't believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald's hash brown if it's all they've got.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“That shit [religion] was going on all over the planet. They would tell them about sky cookies, or sky pie, or sky baklava. And as each of these civilizations grew, they built ships; they'd go visit each other, and the one guy would walk off the boat and go,'Hey, did you hear the good news about the sky baklava?' and the first guy went,'It's CAKE, motherfucker! You're dead!”
― Patton Oswalt

“Its gaze unlocked a room in my nightmares which should have remained closed.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Dear Patton:
I've been feeling blue lately but I wasn't sure if it had anything to do with the amount of rain we've had over the last few weeks. What are your thoughts on that?
Ms. Diller
Cary, NC

Dear Ms. Diller:
Rain can have a profound effect on someone inclined toward melancholy. I live in Los Angeles, and, as of this writing, we've just experienced three weeks of unending late-winter storms. The sky has been a limitless bowl of sludgy, hopeless gray. The ground, soaked and muddy, emits burbly, hissing spurts with every step, which sound like a scornful parent who sees no worth, hope, or value in their offspring. The morning light through my bedroom window promises nothing but a damp, unwelcoming day of thankless busywork and futile, doomed chores. My breakfast cereal tastes like being ostracized. My morning coffee fills my stomach with dread. What's the point of even answering this question?
The rain--it will not stop. Even if I say something that will help you--which I won't, because I'm such a useless piece of shit--you'll eventually die and I'll die and everyone we know will die and this book will turn to dust and the universe will run down and stop, and dead dead dead dead dead.
Dead. Read Chicken Soup for the Soul, I guess. Dead. Dead dead.

Patton”
― Patton Oswalt

“Anything's better than Gen X which is what we got. Thanks Douglas Coupland. We sound like a team of mutant vigalantees with frosted hair and chain wallets. Actually that's not completely horrible.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Movies, to him and the majority of the planet, are an enhancement to a life. The way a glass of wine complements a dinner. I’m the other way around. I’m the kind of person who eats a few bites of food so that my stomach can handle the full bottle of wine I’m about to drink.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“I've been very lucky in my life in terms of people who are able to tolerate me.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Roddy the assistant manager lived in the theater. He'd emptied out one of the supply closets. He'd installed an inflatable mattress, a Shower Anywhere portable shower, and a wee television. He slept amid the powdered-butter fumes and empty drink-syrup tanks. He had grub-white skin and Goth circles under his eyes that, unlike those of Goths, came from really, truly existing half in the world of the dead. He smelled like carpeting, Scotch tape, and steak sauce. He was almost forty but had one of those half mustaches that thirteen-year-olds have. He was the closest thing to a zombie I've yet encountered in this world.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“I visited Surrey in the early fall of 1994, and I would return only if I was tasked to kill a demon to save the world. Maybe not even then. Sorry, Surrey. Sorry, world. Yay, hypothetical demon.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“hobos' (a slang term that combines the words 'hope' and 'bowl of beans given to me for free by a woman who then initiated intercourse')”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“And you'll walk in rolling your eyes and you'll walk out whistling sadly through your teeth because the fuel of the Nerd Mafia is disappointment and exclusion.
- On the Watchmen movie”
― Patton Oswalt

“I'm sitting at the bar, rearranging the order of my jokes. I'm under the delusion that I'm having bad shows because of some cosmic misalignment of words, phrases, and ideas. I may as well have cast runes into a spirit bowl, hoping that the collective heart of the audience would open to my necromantic call. Maybe that's how jugglers do it. Those guys never have shitty sets.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“During the "first Thanksgiving" at Plymouth, Wampanoag Indians - including a Patuxet Indian named Squanto - helped teach Pilgrims how to farm, fish, and hunt and shared the bounty of that first feast. A TRADITION THAT CONTINUES TODAY AND JESUS AND 9/11.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“I had to go back and reread the page a few times. As I read it, I kept drifting out of the book, out of the booth, and coasting on the green crest of the song, to the momentary idea that any point on Earth was mine for the visiting, that I'd lucked out living in the reality I was in. And I also got the feeling I was souring and damaging that luck by enjoying the contentment of pulling the shades on the sun, and shutting out my fellow employees and the world, and folding myself up in the construct of a brilliant novel like The Man in the High Castle, that all the reading I'd been doing up to this point hadn't enhanced my life, but rather had replaced and delayed it.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact. That infrastructure might be on fire, yes.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Boston. Fucking horrible.
I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."
But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.
But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.
But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.
So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will.”
― Patton Oswalt

“And I couldn't take my eyes off Pete. He ate dinner like he always did, in three or four huge, whoofing bites, before heading back out front to his cone of warmth, his coffee, his cigarettes, and ghostly tunes piping from his little transistor radio. And most important, to whatever thoughts drowned out the voices of his own family saying "hello" and "happy holidays."

I watched him because I couldn't believe that could be anyone's comfortable horizon. A tiny porch on a dark corner near a highway. We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he'd rejected it. You're offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Comedy and terror and autobiography and comics and literature-they're all the same thing. To me.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“Eight people show up. The emcee is warm, friendly, and about as funny as Shoah. I take the stage to the sound of, my hand to God, one person clapping once and only once, and then I start into my act.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“I suspected, around the time I graduated college, that we're all versions of targets, fired at by indifferent events. If that was the case, then I wanted to be a moving target.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“If I hear the term ‘healing journey’ one more f–king time… It is not a ‘healing journey.’ It’s a ‘numb slog.’ It’s just a, ‘Well, it’s the end of another day — Guess I’ll do that tomorrow.’ It’s just a numb slog, until you start feeling s–t again. If they would call it a ‘numb slog’ instead of a ‘healing journey,’ it would make it a lot f–king easier. Because if they call it a ‘healing journey,’ it’s just a day of you eating Wheat Thins for breakfast in your underwear, you’re like ‘I guess I’m f–king up my healing journey.’ But if they would say you’re going to have a ‘numb slog,’ you could say ‘oh, I’m nailing it.”
― Patton Oswalt

“I don't care how high my shrink increases my Lexapro dosage - I WANT TO BE A ROBOT THAT HELPS WOLVES HAVE SEX. Otherwise my parents threw away the money they spent on my college education.”
― Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

“The great ones show you what you can get away with. The shitty ones remind you what never to bother with.”
― Patton Oswalt

“Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their twenties?”
― Patton Oswalt