A biography for Paul Feighasn’t been written yet.
“I'm kind of a failure. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm successful in that I'm getting to work on great stuff, but I think I'm a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.”
“What you never want to do is have a story that doesn't track emotionally, because then you're going joke to joke and you're going to fatigue the audience. The only thing that's going to string them to the next joke is how successful the previous joke is.”
“Bad women's comedies are made by men who didn't consult enough women.”
“The awards world can be ridiculous, but I'm not one to bash it. I love awards! When I've been nominated for Emmys and when I won my DGA Award, I couldn't have been happier. I always liked getting a gold star in class.”
“If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.”
“I love funny people, and when I'm with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, 'Hey let me tell you a joke.'”
“When I went to high school, in the late 1970s, disco was in full swing and anyone who was into it dressed the part. I know I did.”
“I'm from Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It's right outside Detroit. The suburbs. I was always very heavily involved in theater back then. I was always in drama club or forensics. Anything that you could do that had some performing, I was doing it.”
“One of the biggest things you have is your reputation and your reputation with knowing what's good and what's not good.”
“I'm extremely, extremely lucky to be who I am and do what I do and work with the people I work with. Even though I can always find something to complain about, I find it very hard to complain.”
“You want a happy ending, but not such a ridiculous happy ending that it doesn't mean anything to anybody.”
“Man up and add a tux to your wardrobe. Just find one you like and get it well-tailored to your own measurements.”
“As a director, I really wanted to learn and I needed to get away from my own stuff to figure out how to just do things and work with good people.”
“As far I'm concerned, being an adult is way more fun than being a kid. But then I was a kid who wanted to be an adult. I'd watch shows like 'Bewitched' and see Darren come home and mix a martini and I'd go, 'That looks awesome! I want to do that!'”
“A lot of comedies fall apart because they just go from joke to joke, and the characters are all sort of being crazy off on their own.”
“What you want is the thing that critics love and audiences love, but that's the hardest thing to do.”
“The reason most comedies don't win awards is that the filmmakers put the comedy first. This means you have to create a story around the jokes.”
“You need to have one element about your outfit that is imperfect, that says you live in it and you're not letting it control you. I think men and women both need a softness about them with formal wear.”
“Throughout my teens, I just wanted to go somewhere I could wear a Donald Duck pin and no one would care.”
“'Nuclear' is nothing but trouble. Do you say 'new-clear' or do you say 'nuke-you-ler'? Whoever invented that word had obviously never studied the human mouth. We don't have enough muscles in our face to make that group of letters come out smoothly. The word is missing a middle syllable, for cryin' out loud.”