Paul F. Tompkins

“There's so much being said about Donald Trump already, all the time, and the more you joke about him, the more you risk making the same jokes other people are making about him.”

“The thing you have to be on guard against, more than anything, is self-sabotage. You have to make sure you're not your own worst enemy.”

“Just because I have a good vocabulary, I don't think of myself as anachronistic - just because I try not to use the word 'like' every other word.”

“I've had people - I've seen people do routines that I knew they didn't take from me but they had - because for whatever reason I had stopped doing it a long time ago. There's no way they would have heard this bit. But it ends up being pretty much the same thing.”

“Ice-T is a great sport about people doing impressions of him, apparently, obviously, and so I have no choice but to be a great sport about being pranked by Ice-T.”

“I loved Garry Marshall. The television shows he created in the '80s were the most deeply important entertainment of my childhood.”

“Nobody held a gun to my head and forced me to write recaps about the tenth season of 'American Idol.' Although I feel like someone must have and I just forgot about it.”

“I love to do the stream-of-consciousness thing, because it's exciting for me, and I like to think it's exciting for the audience, too.”

“Earwolf had approached me a long time ago, even before I had started the 'Pod F. Tompkast.' I knew that I wanted to do a podcast, and I knew everyone there and that it was something for me to do, but I didn't know quite what I wanted to do yet.”

“Elections are so crazy.”

“When I started doing stand-up in the late eighties, that was not an uncommon thing, that people dressed for the stage. I've seen that change as time has gone by to where, for me, it's something that people remark on. And that's when I started to really embrace it in a way and get more flamboyant and foppish with the way that I dress.”

“Some people just want to make up the funny things and play pretend.”

“Well 'The Pod F. Tompkast,' as much as I love the result of it, was a really labor intensive show. There's a lot of writing, there's a lot of scheduling, there's a lot of recording - it's not a show that we can necessarily do in one day because there are so many moving parts to it.”

“Mork, played by Robin Williams, was my introduction to improv, and my first real peek behind the curtain of television production; I had seen Williams riffing on 'The Tonight Show' and soon put it together that certain scenes with Mork were not scripted.”

“Look, we have long known that birds and pigs are mortal enemies. That's just the way of the world. Birds hate pigs.”

“When the task is mocking pop culture, it's easy to make sarcastic comments and consider the job done. After a while, I began to feel like this route was completely pointless. Talking about silly, inconsequential stuff doesn't mean you can't put some effort into it.”

“For me, writing is just a means to an end. It gives me something to do on stage.”

“When you're getting your facts from people, consider the way that they are being given to you.”

“Being in Los Angeles, I've had access to some of the best improvisers around and I really study them and what they do. It really it just about listening and what you can add to it.”

“Part of our job is to dig deep and rediscover the joy that we had when we were first starting out. Also, when you gain responsibility, if you are the host of a TV show and you have responsibilities as a producer and a writer and so forth, you then have to deal with the mechanics of it, which is not always fun.”