Paul Reiser Quotes

#1. Get a good dog. We have not picked up food in the kitchen in 15 years.

Paul Reiser

#2. I used to walk into a party and scan the room for attractive women. Now I look for women to hold my baby so I can eat potato salad sitting down.

Paul Reiser

#3. Two or three times a week, I drive by the houses of numbers 78-100 just to rub it in,

Paul Reiser

#4. Happiness is the quiet lull between problems.

Paul Reiser

#5. There's something very refreshing about being on stage.

Paul Reiser

#6. But you get past that and realize you have to let go of what you think you want. There'll be plenty of time for that later. Right now, go and be with that baby. Just play with this beautiful little boy.

Paul Reiser

#7. Younger kids, they understand that things aren't so perfect with their father or with their mother.

Paul Reiser

#8. Just because a baby cries, I discovered, doesn't mean there's always something wrong. Sometimes babies wake up for no real reason. They just want to check if they're doing it right. "This is Sleeping, right?" "Exactly." "I just lie here?" "That's right." "Okay." Then back to sleep they go.

Paul Reiser

#9. My wife and I never agree on the dishtowels. It's a matter of terms. She asks me not to put the dishtowel in the sink. So I drape it over the sink, but not in the sink. If that's our biggest problem, I think we're in good shape.

Paul Reiser

#10. The best part of being married is ... you don't have to explain a lot of things. Those wordless moments when you both know that what you witnessed together is funny, idiotic, or really sweet. Being connected is pretty miraculous.

Paul Reiser

#11. But at the same time that the experience is pulling you apart, it's also bonding you. You have this joint venture! You both made this baby. And that's the thing I still can't get over.

Paul Reiser

#12. If a tree falls on your head in a forest and no one hears it, it still hurts.

Paul Reiser

#13. We have such a long, familiar history with Peter Falk. The minute his mug is on that screen people smile.

Paul Reiser

#14. But the two of them together, broke my heart. Olympia and Peter, those scenes ... When they're kissing in their 20s and then kissing in their 70s, that's what it is. And they had never met five minutes before they shot those scenes.

Paul Reiser

#15. People come up to us and ask how we knew so much about their own family ... I'm talking about people from faraway places, too. I get people from Turkey and Chile coming up to me and saying I wrote about their family.

Paul Reiser

#16. As you get older you realize your parents don't look so dumb - and that you're not as smart as you thought you were.

Paul Reiser

#17. It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else.

Paul Reiser

#18. The most rewarding part about being a dad is just looking at children who didn't exist at some point. The first time you saw them, they were the size of a quarter, in a sonogram, and now they can pour orange juice and yell at each other.

Paul Reiser

#19. Peanut butter and lamb chops were not foods that had ever been a significant part of our life before pregnancy. In fact, my wife almost never ate either.So where did these craving come from? I concluded it's the baby, ordering in.

Paul Reiser

#20. Not only do I sing to him, I sing entire conversations. You become Jerry Lewis.

Paul Reiser

#21. I'd distract myself until finally it was a combination of things. The show was over and I had time on my hands. I had taken time and played and just relaxed.

Paul Reiser

#22. There was a period where our child's birth was getting really close, and we still had nothing. We were dangerously close to calling him Untitled Baby Project.

Paul Reiser

#23. That's the nice thing about doing stand-up. There's no development, you just go out there and get an immediate response as to whether something is good or bad. Getting a laugh is the best measure of how well you're doing.

Paul Reiser

#24. Our date-nightrule is no talking about the kids. That lasts about to the end of the driveway.

Paul Reiser

#25. And after you've done the acting, there's a lot of places you can put your input - in the editing, in the production of it, in the rewriting of it and so on.

Paul Reiser

#26. Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.

Paul Reiser

#27. I'm not smart enough to write about something that didn't actually happen to me. But I couldn't write a space movie if you put a gun to my head.

Paul Reiser

#28. I always loved comedy, but I never knew it was something you could learn to do. I always thought that some people are born comedians ... just like some people are born dentists.

Paul Reiser

#29. Parents often give middle names just so that later, when they're yelling at the kid, they can drag it out. Henry David Thoreau, you come in here this instant!

Paul Reiser

#30. There are two types of people in life - those who get it and those who don't.

Paul Reiser

#31. The most used appliance in our house is my 10-year-old son Leon's Xbox.

Paul Reiser

#32. A new child in the house is a huge tourist attraction. It's like Disneyland, except there the lines are longer and no one brings casseroles.

Paul Reiser

#33. You know, the fact that every morning you get a script in your mailbox, that's going to stop. All these little pedestrian, mundane things. And the cash.

Paul Reiser

#34. In the original draft I was 27 and Peter was 55 in the script. That's not the same as a guy in his 40s and a dad in the end of his 70s. It's a different point in both our lives.

Paul Reiser

#35. Marriage is just an elaborate game that allows two selfish people to periodically feel that they're not.

Paul Reiser

#36. I remember my wife and I used to get on plane and see everybody else with their babies. They'd be putting strollers and car seats up above, and we'd think: Oh, please Lord, don't make us go through that.

Paul Reiser

#37. When you realize you would consider not having a child just so you could take an occasional snooze and be available to see Batman Retires the same weekend it comes out, you have to take a good hard look at yourself and acknowledge, I am a shallow, shallow person.

Paul Reiser

#38. I can't get past the fact that food is coming out of my wife's breasts. What was once essentially an entertainment center has now become a juice bar.

Paul Reiser

#39. Once in a while you get a moment of clarity - an inspiration - and they don't come that frequently.

Paul Reiser

#40. My parenting style could be described as not good cop or bad cop so much as nervous cop. I'm always yelling for somebody to stop because they're about to get hurt. I'm the take a jacket, slow down guy.

Paul Reiser

#41. And in that time, I lost my dad and had kids of my own. It was like, OK, I get it now. I know what fatherhood is all about. And you look at your parents differently.

Paul Reiser

#42. Field of Dreams is the only movie - and I saw it in the theater - on an afternoon when I was on location somewhere, and there were like 12 people in the theater. I was just so devastated; I couldn't get out of my seat. And I sat and watched it a second time.

Paul Reiser

#43. This is not the most right I've ever been.

Paul Reiser

#44. She kind of reminds one of Helen. There's something very similar about Elizabeth Perkins.

Paul Reiser

#45. There's something that happens in that delivery room, when a woman becomes ten times more a woman, and a guy becomes six times less a man. You feel really dopey and useless and like a spectator. I did, anyway.

Paul Reiser

#46. When my son said, "I can't stop thinking about girls," I said, "That's not gonna stop. Congratulations. You're in the club. From now until the day you die, one way or another you'll be thinking about girls.

Paul Reiser

#47. A friend told me to listen to my heart. Another friend told me to listen to my gut. Maybe I need an autopsy, because right now my colon is kind of iffy.

Paul Reiser

#48. Upstate New York in the middle of October. You can't get more beautiful than that.

Paul Reiser

#49. Nothing would make me happier if Peter Falk would finally win his Oscar for this. Not just as the writer but as a fan and a friend. It would be so great.

Paul Reiser

#50. In the history of life, no good news has followed that sentence ["We have to talk."].

Paul Reiser

#51. Middle names are kind of like vice presidents: It's a fine distinction and certainly an honor, but you're never not aware that someone else got the real job.

Paul Reiser

#52. He was born early. But he was born within a safe range of premature.

Paul Reiser

#53. Every time I see Peter Falk in the movie I think that would be great. We'd be fun together.

Paul Reiser

#54. But I really felt that, something about the lights going down, and the sense of community. I saw this movie at one festival, and there were 1700 people.

Paul Reiser

#55. The simple combination of letters and sounds you select as a name for your baby can result in a life of carefree coolness or decades of expensive therapy. Hi, I'm Jake versus Hi, I'm ... Tapioca

Paul Reiser

#56. We made this movie for $17, and nobody got anything. So it never dawned on me that we would get real people.

Paul Reiser

#57. My wife would say my worst habit is that I'm not good at dropping subjects. If something bothers me, I'll bring it up endlessly and relentlessly. I think it's a search for clarity, but she uses different words.

Paul Reiser

#58. By shrewdly linking procreation to an act likely to make you stupid with excitement, God has seen to it that Life does indeed go on. It's possible, by the way, that this is why God's name comes up so often in the middle of the act; it's a salute to the author: Hey, whoever made this up - thanks.

Paul Reiser

#59. The biggest thing I remember is that there was just no transition. You hit the ground diapering.

Paul Reiser

#60. In fact, I had the idea because of Peter Falk. I saw my dad watching a Peter Falk movie and something clicked in my head. I gotta go make a movie for Peter Falk and me.

Paul Reiser

#61. They don't see that whole pattern. Worm/death. Worm/death. I would catch on.

Paul Reiser

#62. You know what? The obvious is obvious for a reason.

Paul Reiser

#63. The consumer mentality - we like something, what other flavor does it come in? We like that TV show, does it come in a book form? Does it come in a capsule? How about a soup?

Paul Reiser

#64. I'd never directed before and this movie's too important to me to put in the hands of some guy who has never directed. Even if it's me.

Paul Reiser

#65. We had the boy's name picked out, but we didn't have a girl's. When he turned out to be a boy, we were so relieved. Literally, in the middle of contracting and pushing, and with my wife being drugged - out and half - lucid, we were still coming up with names.

Paul Reiser

#66. Why do you think people close their eyes when they kiss? Think about it. In the real world, if you saw someone an-inch-and-a-half away, coming at you with their eyes open and their lips puckered, you'd scream. It's alarming.

Paul Reiser

#67. They're not the sharpest people - babies. So, you must be everything to them.

Paul Reiser

#68. The jewel in the baby product crown is the stroller. And if in America you are what you drive, then in Parentland, you are what you push.

Paul Reiser

#69. New parents always sound like hucksters in a pyramid scheme. Anyone who has kids and then gets you to go and have kids gets a check from Huckster Headquarters.

Paul Reiser

#70. It was trying to make my tennis game look mildly respectable, which I found you don't even really need to practice if you have a really good editor. They can edit it and you're like, "Hey, it looks like I'm playing really well." That was the fun part, but it was like going to summer camp.

Paul Reiser