Mike Birbiglia > Quotes

“Falling in love for the first time is a completely transcendent experience. It’s like eating pizza-flavored ice cream. Your brain can’t even process that level of joy. Love makes people do crazy things like kill other people or shop at Crate & Barrel. I think on some level it makes us all delusional. Deep down, our whole lives, no matter how low our self-esteem gets, we think, I have a special skill that no one knows about and if they knew they’d be amazed. And then eventually we meet someone who says, “You have a secret special skill.” And you’re like, “I know! So do you!” And they’re like, “I know!” And then you’re like, “We should eat pizza ice cream together.” And that’s what love is. It’s this giant mound of pizza-flavored ice cream and delusion”
― Mike Birbiglia

“Saturday night is perfect for writers because other people have "plans.”
― Mike Birbiglia

“It had that kind of open-ended fear to it - like that feeling you get when you're driving and you see a cop. And you're not speeding. You don't have drugs. But you're just thinking, I hope he doesn't notice I'm driving.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“When you're in a relationship with someone who's selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it's this souped-up shine. And you feel like you're in the club. And you don't even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk with Me: and Other Painfully True Stories

“I'm a compulsive everything.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I'm a big fan of pastries the size of a baby that contain enough calories for a year. That seems like an effective use of time.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I was a big dreamer and never particularly good at anything--a real dilemma. I wasn't terrible. I was just... okay. If you're terrible, you can write everybody off, like, "I don't know what the hell those idiots are doing?" I knew what those idiots were doing. And I knew that they did it better than me.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I don’t go to church, but I regularly attend the Museum of Natural History.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“Sometimes, when you want to be in a place so badly, you'll do anything.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“A joke should never end with “I’m joking.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“I wake up at 4:30 am to jump on a plane, which is that part of the morning before the earth even exists. Before they've even programmed the Matrix. You walk out of your apartment and the road isn't even there. You walk out of your house, and there's just a guy with a laptop who yells, "We need a road, stat!" "How 'bout a building, Tank!”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk with Me: and Other Painfully True Stories

“Jokes have been ruined by people who aren't good at telling jokes. A joke should never end with "I'm Joking.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“...And so we go and I meet his parents. And it's a very strange thing meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. Part of you is angry for obvious reasons and part of you still wants to make a good impression. On a side note, they seemed in perfect health.”
― Mike Birbiglia

“I didn't realize how good I was with computers until I met my parents.”
― Mike Birbiglia

“I’m not immediately in love with our monkey. I’m committed to our monkey. I start trying to figure out how to finance our life with the monkey for the next twenty years. If someone tried to take the monkey, I would have punched that person until they killed me. But I’m not attached to the monkey. I’d like to tell you that I was. Because some people are. And some people aren’t. And the ones who aren’t generally don’t tell you that they aren’t. I would do anything for our baby monkey. But it doesn’t mean I understand our baby monkey.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“This book is an experiment. We figured it out as we went along. Sort of like a family.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“Aging is like climbing to the top of a mountain and then you either jump off and die or inch your way down until you fall to your death. I never imagined the inching part, just the climbing.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“A joke without comedic timing is a statement of pure insanity.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“So I’m standing in a tree thirty feet above the pond with my three friends and my friend Pat says, “Dude, jump!” And I look down at the water, which is so far away, and I say, “That doesn’t seem like a good plan.” And they said, “Dude, we already jumped, it’s no biggie. What’s the worst thing that could happen? It’s only watah” (that’s “water” with a Boston accent), which is really flawed logic, that watah logic. I learn later that many bad things historically have happened in water. Shark attacks. Drowning. Bad sex. But my friend Nick makes an argument that in Massachusetts is irrefutable. He’s like, “Do it.” So I do.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk with Me: and Other Painfully True Stories

“This is my situation. I'm the kind of person who, for fun, writes articles called 'Aviation Club Soars into Orbit!' and an unhappy bully I've never heard of is sending out envoys.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Jokes have been ruined by people who aren’t good at telling jokes.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“We joke about things we're most anxious about to diffuse the anxiety of the actual threat.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“Cynical is: The glass is half empty. Skeptical is more like: Is that even a glass? Is this even water?”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“Jokes have been ruined by people who aren't good at telling jokes. A joke should never end with 'I'm joking.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“My brain is like a Snapple cap. It can hold one piece of information at a time.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“I shouldn't say bad things about the illiterate, though..I should write it.”
― Mike Birbiglia

“Pizza is a Band Aid for so many problems.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad