Mike Birbiglia

“Sometimes you'll have a heckler who's actually attempting to be supportive, but you don't realize it. Their way of expressing it is kind of confusing.”

“I'm generally so disoriented during the week about what I'm doing and where I am - I travel a lot - that when I'm home on a Sunday, I typically try to sleep in as much as I can.”

“I think your tendency when you play yourself is to accentuate something about you that you think is the funny thing about you.”

“Media is so weird; everything is so accessible now. It used to be this thing where, if you did something on 'This American Life,' this predates me, but when David Sedaris did it, for example, it would just play, people who heard it heard it, and then the book would come out a year later, and people would be like, 'Ahh, I kind of remember that.'”

“You don't really see sleepwalking in films that often. It's weird; I feel like in popular culture we have the perception of sitcom, arms-in-front-of-your-body sleepwalking, and then maybe Olive Oil and Popeye when she sleepwalks through the construction site. But it's all very cartoonish, in some cases literally.”

“In some sense, Comedy Central has made their audience into comedy connoisseurs.”

“Every comedian comes to a fork in the road where they have to decide if they're going to make jokes about other people or make jokes about themselves. I chose myself.”

“Fortunately, I don't talk about politics on stage.”

“You know the quickest way to get comedians to hate you? Do Letterman at age 24.”

“When you're in high school, you can't even imagine the concept of what the rest of your life even means.”

“Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase 'Don't tell anyone.' But not about creepy things. I don't want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like, I wouldn't make the soccer team, and my father would say, 'Don't tell anyone.'”

“I always live tweet 'SNL.'”

“The Hollywood model is to develop scripts for 10 years, sell them, transfer them, attach this actor, then attach a director. This isn't what I'm about. I'm much more of a creator and a doer.”

“Sometimes I take this women's exercise class called Core Fusion at a place called Exhale. I shouldn't say it's a women's class. There's maybe two men.”

“I think the thing I had to be careful about while writing a book was not to say anything that was revealing about other people that they would be uncomfortable with. I didn't want to make people angry - that's a real risk.”

“The Comedy Central CDs combined with the TV specials are what led to my stuff being traded and passed around, and a lot more people knowing my jokes than I thought.”

“I'm incapable of feeling any joy.”

“I couldn't recommend more that people put themselves in a situation where they can see a lot of work that they admire, and for free.”

“My first car was, as depicted in 'Sleepwalk with Me,' my mother's '92 Volvo station wagon that had 80,000 miles on it, and I had put 40,000 miles on it, so by the time it retired it had 120,000, and I basically killed it. It served me well, and my mechanic was always very angry with me because I just didn't properly care for it.”

“If you're asked something on a movie set and you say 'I don't know,' you lose confidence in every department. What you need to say is 'I'll have that for you in five minutes.'”