Nicholas Stoller

“As a comedy writer, I'm always praying for the day I can tell a self-aware/break-the-fourth-wall style of joke.”

“If you're engaged more than a year, there's something up. There's lot of debate as to whether one should or shouldn't get married, but when you get engaged, it's a promise to get married, and if you don't just do it within a year, one of the parties is using the excuse of, like, 'I can't find the right venue' to put off the wedding.”

“There are still movies where females are just there to be cool, or they are there to lambaste their husbands and scold. But female comedy characters are changing for the better.”

“Each of the 'Toy Story's are telling an emotional story, but they're comedic. They're so successful creatively in terms of the stories they're telling. And they're pretty grounded.”

“All of the things I've directed, I'm really emotionally close to. That's why I choose to direct them and spend years on them.”

“The movies I've made, I'm really proud of them. But the experience I've had is, people say to me, 'Oh my God, I saw your movie on HBO. It was actually funny.' Like, that's always the experience. It's a backhanded compliment.”

“I mean, come on: At the end of the day, we're all bisexual. A hundred years from now, there's not gonna be gay or straight. There's gonna be everything.”

“It's really weird casting babies; it's kind of the dark underbelly of Hollywood, to meet babies and judge them.”

“When the photographer is nearby, I like to say, 'Quick, get a photo of me looking into the camera,' because I'm never looking into the camera. Christopher Nolan looks into the camera, but I think most directors don't, so whenever you see a picture of a director looking at the camera, it's fake.”

“The frustrations and joys of parenthood are just hard to understand until you have a kid... the constant fight you're having with yourself, like loving being with your kid but also being kind of bored and wanting to look at your iPhone - it's kind of an interesting thing that's hard to write about before you've experienced it.”

“There are so few good comedy sequels. The only one in recent memory that's good is '22 Jump Street.' It's a hard genre.”

“My family is really into politics.”

“I'm pretty old-fashioned. I feel most people - and this is purely from observation; I'm not an expert - but I think most people want to get married, whatever one might say about the institution of marriage, especially if you are in a long relationship.”

“I've always had as many friends who are women as friends who are guys.”

“The worst thing you can do is animate something and then throw it out because it doesn't work story-wise.”

“I just watched 'Lethal Weapon' for the first time, and it's awesome... and so violent! Mel is out of his mind in that movie. Although now we know he's just insane - he was very much in his mind.”

“I am personally quite liberal.”

“R-rated comedies make as much money as PG-13. And I think the audiences wanna be shocked. Especially with comedy.”

“You just never know with movies how they'll be seen in a few years. You have no idea. Like, movies that were super popular when they came out have been forgotten. And other movies - and I put 'Sarah Marshall' in this - kind of weirdly stand the test of time a little bit.”

“The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more awkward it is, the more people are stumbly, the funnier it is. I like a sharp joke, but it has to say something that someone would actually say.”