Paul Feig > Quotes

“I honestly see the battle between Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative as the exact same dynamic--there's a group of people in this world that don't like conflict and care about what other people are going through, and then there's this other group of people in the world who hate that. 'Suck it up, man, we're not coddling you, take care of yourself, what's your problem?' It's jocks versus geeks, and I've always referred to life as perpetual high school because it never stops.”
― Paul Feig

“so, what happened next will have to go down in my book of Bad Decisions, planted firmly in the chapter entitled, I have no idea what I was thinking”
― Paul Feig

“I was afraid of anyone in a costume. A trip to see Santa might as well have been a trip to sit on Hitler's lap for all the trauma it would cause me. Once, when I was four, my mother and I were in a Sears and someone wearing an enormous Easter Bunny costume headed my way to present me with a chocolate Easter egg. I was petrified by this nightmarish six-foot-tall bipedal pink fake-fur monster with human-sized arms and legs and a soulless, impassive face heading toward me. It waved halfheartedly as it held a piece of candy out in an evil attempt to lure me into its clutches. Fearing for my life, I pulled open the bottom drawer of a display case and stuck my head inside, the same way an ostrich buries its head in the sand. This caused much hilarity among the surrounding adults, and the chorus of grown-up laughter I heard echoing from within that drawer only added to the horror of the moment. Over the next several years, I would run away in terror from a guy in a gorilla suit whose job it was to wave customers into a car wash, a giant Uncle Sam on stilts, a midget dressed like a leprechaun, an astronaut, the Detroit Tigers mascot, Ronald McDonald, Big Bird, Bozo the Clown, and every Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Chip and Dale, Uncle Scrooge, and Goofy who walked the streets at Disneyland. Add to this an irrational fear of small dogs that saw me on more than one occasion fleeing in terror from our neighbor's four-inch-high miniature dachschund as if I were being chased by the Hound of the Baskervilles and a chronic case of germ phobia, and it's pretty apparent that I was--what some of the less politically correct among us might call--a first-class pussy.”
― Paul Feig, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence

“My feeling was that there are no victories when you're a geek. Actually, I take that back. There is a victory: you still have your friends, and you've gotten through the experience alive. That's the biggest victory you can have in high school.”
― Paul Feig

“Don't kid yourself munster”
― Paul Feig

“NBC would broadcast these public-service announcements. The Cosby kids would say things like, "Don't do drugs, because you've got a lot to live for." And I used to think, Well, okay--it's easy to say that, but some people are sitting at home and aren't from a rich family and might have no future. And here's a kid actor making shitloads of money, and he's telling everyone they have a lot to live for? It's hypocrisy on the grandest scale. Seeing something like that was always a motivation for me to create something more realistic.

That was one of the things I dealt with in the "I'm with the Band" episode [of Freaks and Geeks], where Nick auditions to become a drummer. Lindsay tells Nick, "You've got to follow your dreams! You can be anything you want to be!"

When I wrote that episode, it was my way of saying, "Actually, no. That's nonsense. You might have that attitude, but that's not the way the world works.”
― Paul Feig

“The cruel side of me likes creating situations where people get buried deeper and deeper. I find that really amusing--the fact that Lindsay [in Freaks and Geeks] starts out encouraging Nick to follow his dreams and then ends up feeling sorry for him and making out with him and then getting stuck with this nightmare boyfriend, well...that's real life to me.”
― Paul Feig

“I also never encountered a real piece of toilet paper until I went away to college, because my father would stock our bathrooms with the industrial tissue that he bought at a discount from his government wholesalers. It had all the softness and absorbency of typing paper and acted more like a frosting spreader than a piece of toilet tissue.”
― Paul Feig, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence

“Childhood is built on bad decision-making.”
― Paul Feig, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence

“I’ve always thought that because of all the polyester we humans encased ourselves in back in the 1970s, if a nuclear bomb had ever gone off, we might not have died but we would have definitely all been laminated.”
― Paul Feig, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence