Kumail Nanjiani Quotes

#1. Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It's unsuccessful if they don't laugh.

Kumail Nanjiani

#2. We only hear success stories. You don't hear about the hundreds and hundreds - the overwhelming majority that don't go anywhere. This is a more realistic portrayal of what happens in startups.

Kumail Nanjiani

#3. It's not like I listened to music and then stopped. I still don't have a real appreciation for music because I didn't really start listening to it until my 20s.

Kumail Nanjiani

#4. I think, you know, a lot of the business of comedy is taking your personal experiences and making them relatable to other people.

Kumail Nanjiani

#5. I thought of America as this crazy, happy, exciting place where everybody's rich and there's stuff everywhere. Compared to Pakistan, it's not untrue.

Kumail Nanjiani

#6. It wasn't until I moved to New York that I decided to make a conscious effort to be myself.

Kumail Nanjiani

#7. My stories take three or four months to fix, and it's not magical of a process. Ultimately it's a boring, difficult process. I write everything out, and then the parts I think are funny I put in bold. Then I go perform it. Then the parts that aren't funny, I unbold them.

Kumail Nanjiani

#8. The whole religion of Islam is based on reward and punishment and reward and punishment, and it becomes a part of how you think of everything. Even yourself.

Kumail Nanjiani

#9. Just because you saw a vampire doesn't mean that a snowman or a Loch Ness Monster also exists.

Kumail Nanjiani

#10. I never really got into game shows. The easiest one is 'Wheel Of Fortune' because you just have to know words, and for the most part everyone knows words.

Kumail Nanjiani

#11. Philosophy is problem-solving. There's a philosophical problem, and then you try to solve it by approaching it from different angles and seeing what way works. That's what comedy is: you have a topic and you try to just hit it as many different ways as you can.

Kumail Nanjiani

#12. Honestly, I would love to be friends with Fox Mulder on 'The X-Files.' That's almost a little too obvious, but that would be my answer. I'd love to hang out with him.

Kumail Nanjiani

#13. You really need to have that discipline. It's not even discipline. I just put down these rules. It's not like a vague, 'Motivate yourself!' and do something. It's specific hours set aside every day for certain things.

Kumail Nanjiani

#14. The plan was always to come to America, because Pakistan's a scary place. They don't have religious freedom. It's very poor, and there's a lot of violence and corruption.

Kumail Nanjiani

#15. When I started working on 'Michael And Michael,' it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone.

Kumail Nanjiani

#16. I stay home. It's the best place to be alone. There is hardly any walk-through traffic.

Kumail Nanjiani

#17. I approximated the Black Friday experience at home by hurling myself into a wall a number of times and then ordering online.

Kumail Nanjiani

#18. I think being funny had something to do with feeling like an outsider, not feeling cool - insecurity.

Kumail Nanjiani

#19. I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

Kumail Nanjiani

#20. I'm from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor.

Kumail Nanjiani

#21. I am a very nerdy guy. I understand that it's easier to cast me as a nerdy guy than an action star - although I would love to be an action star!

Kumail Nanjiani

#22. The worst job I ever had was an office job that I had for six years, and that's nothing against the people who I was surrounded by, because they were wonderful people.

Kumail Nanjiani

#23. Wikipedia is kind of weird. I feel it's lame to put up my own page, but I desperately want someone else to do it.

Kumail Nanjiani

#24. I moved to New York first and was really apprehensive about moving to L.A., but I really, really like it.

Kumail Nanjiani

#25. I love constructive criticism. I love getting notes when I'm acting. I love them telling me what to do. I don't always agree with it, but I really need it.

Kumail Nanjiani

#26. If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

Kumail Nanjiani

#27. I was on this path to becoming a computer-science guy, but I didn't like it. I got no joy from it. It was very, very scary. It was suffocating to think that I was just going to do this thing for the rest of my life.

Kumail Nanjiani

#28. I would say I try to make my comedy really personal. I try to tell stories that happened to me, experiences from my life.

Kumail Nanjiani

#29. Living in Pakistan, you didn't have a sense of how huge and varied America was, geographically.

Kumail Nanjiani

#30. On stage I just have to be myself. In acting you have to be so many other people.

Kumail Nanjiani

#31. You can get stuck in the trap of reading your YouTube comments all the time. Sometimes I regret it. Not everyone is going to love you. And for some reason, stand-up has this thing where everyone thinks they can do it. So everyone thinks they're an expert.

Kumail Nanjiani

#32. I love, love, love the street-cart food. Gyros are like a meat-flavored fruit roll-up. A meat roll-up.

Kumail Nanjiani

#33. I was extremely shy and had a terrible fear of public speaking. But I had fallen in love with stand-up.

Kumail Nanjiani