Quotes by Paul Feig

Yeah, you know, I like to throw myself on the sword so that others may feel better about themselves. I tell the stories that you all want to forget, but when you remember it, it hopefully makes you laugh.

We didn't used to be so precious about women in comedy back in the old days.

I can't impress enough upon people that if you tell an honest story that people relate to and people believe and invest in, you can do anything.

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.

At the end of the day, I just want a movie that's great, that people are going to love and laugh at and be affected by, and also have an emotional journey.

At the end of the day if you want to entertain people, you've got to take your ego out of the equation.

My feeling was that there are no victories when you're a geek. Actually, I take that back. There is a victory: you still have your friends, and you've gotten through the experience alive. That's the biggest victory you can have in high school.

Katie Dippold, who I wrote the script with, she's very into ghosts and all that. So I go, Hey, why don't you talk to Katie?

When guys see a movie starring women, they go, That must be filled with these characters I see in these movies who are such a drag. And that's just bad for everybody.

I'm really a skeptic. I'm kind of not a believer in the paranormal.

What's so great about working with really funny women is that vanity comes second. Whatever makes it real and funny, they're going to go for, and it's just great.

Who knew there were so many ghosts to be busted in the world?

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.

In a perfect world, I'd love to make 90-minute movies, but for me, a movie needs to be as long or short as it can sustain itself.

I mean Ally McBeal was sort of the closest thing I can think of to kind of being a comedy-drama but that had its own kind of style that meant it got kind of big sometimes. But it was a great show.

Bad women's comedies are made by men who didn't consult enough women.

I'm just an enormous British comedy fan.

Any ensemble -- they didn't call it the all-male Expendables, for example. But it's Hollywood's fault that people say that, because there have been so few movies that have allowed women to have these leading roles, so that's Hollywood's fault.

Why is a movie starring women considered a gimmick and a movie starring men is just a normal movie?

Little Britain… ever since it first came on… I come here a lot, we have a lot of friends here, my wife used to work with a lot of Brits, so we were always keyed into the hot shows when they first came out. So, I fell in love with Little Britain.

There's nothing worse than the sequel that's a letdown from the first movie.

You just have to be classy at the end of the day. That doesn't mean you can't go with a midnight blue tux. And if you can find a deep red tux that looks classy and classic, I think you can pull it off.

I always felt, and still feel, one of my best strengths as a director is having been an actor for a long time. Nobody knows actors and their insecurities and strengths and everything more than somebody who's done it before.

God does things that fly completely in the face of what we've all been taught that He is supposed to do and every time He does this, we all just say, 'Oh, well, I guess there must be some good reason why He did that.

To me, there's nothing funnier than funny people in peril, because it's just a great springboard for people to be at a heightened emotionality and things get funnier.

One of the many things I want to do is dig us out of that hole so that guys, in particular, can go: Oh, yeah. Those people are really funny. I've seen that person. It's a woman. They are funny.

People are like, Why are you all dressed up? Did you dress up just for me? I'm like No, I dressed up because I'm an adult and I felt like putting on my suit. But I love it. Tom Ford and Ralph Lauren are my two heroes of clothing designers.

Man up and add a tux to your wardrobe. Just find one you like and get it well-tailored to your own measurements.

With a suit, even if you're having a nervous breakdown, you still look like you're in charge.

Wearing a tuxedo isn't as simple as it sounds. I've been to a lot of award shows in Hollywood over the years and have seen some pretty sad tuxes. It's surprisingly easy to go off the rails.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've felt comfortable in a suit. It all started when my mom bought me a three-piece Pierre Cardin suit. I wore that thing everywhere. Eventually I realized I was going to be the kid who got beat up in school, but I kept wearing it.

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.

Getting away from a white or light colored tuxedo shirt is always a little dangerous. Certain staples shouldn't be mixed with. Light pink or blue is not bad, but again, you're just breaking from a classic.

As tempting as it seems to wear tennis shoes with your tux, don't do it. I think it looks ridiculous. If you're 14 years old, maybe give it a shot. In general, don't portray anything that says 'I'm too cool and I don't care.

As tempting as it seems to wear tennis shoes with your tux, don't do it. I think it looks ridiculous. If you're 14 years old, maybe give it a shot. In general, don't portray anything that says 'I'm too cool and I don't care.'

I really feed off of The Walking Dead.

So many stars who have shows are intimidated by having people around them be funnier than them. It's always the unsuccessful ones. Look at Seinfeld -- he's great because he let everyone be hilarious.

I've never been to a class reunion or anything because I'm always afraid of that one -- there's going to be some 'Carrie'-like incident.

Period costume films are fun to discover, but they're not relatable. It's more, 'Wow, that's cool -- did it really look like that back then?' Whereas with a comedy, you're like, 'Yeah, that's me, that's my friends.' No matter what, I want people to relate.

I've never had to get a job as a waiter or anything. I've always been able to support myself in 'the biz.' Which is great. It's really fantastic to be able to say that, because I know it's hard to do.

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.

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.

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!'

Forty is the line of demarcation that says you're an adult now. You're an adult, so don't pretend you're a kid anymore.

You can never have a thousand percent batting average on jokes -- it's just never going to happen.

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.

I'm a pretty feminized geek, you know? I have that point of view, I grew up around a lot of girls, so I'm pretty sensitive to that. But I don't dare say 'I know how women think.'

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.

I'm glad I took the leap away from acting into going behind the camera because it's much more satisfying -- I love acting and I still do, but it's much more satisfying to be able to make the stuff.

I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.

God does things that fly completely in the face of what we've all been taught that He is supposed to do and every time He does this, we all just say, 'Oh, well, I guess there must be some good reason why He did that.'

I'm not looking for people to bow down to me or do things in my name or even pass around a collection plate for me. I say that I'd like to be God for a while because He really can get away with anything. I mean, ANYTHING.

I've never been comfortable around groups of guys when it gets into the putting-down. My past being a kind of geek -- it kind of turns into an attack on the weakest of the group.

Women comedy is different than men comedy. Guy comedy is very aggressive, it's about insulting each other, name-calling, and kind of busting each other's chops, and that's not what women's comedy is.

One of the biggest things you have is your reputation and your reputation with knowing what's good and what's not good.

At the end of the day, successful box office just means that more people saw what you did and liked it, and that to me is the most important thing. That a lot of people saw it and liked it.

The hard thing is getting people to come to the theater to see something, no matter if it's good or not.

I have an inability to enjoy things, but that's why we're in comedy. If we were happy, we wouldn't be funny, I guess.

What you want is the thing that critics love and audiences love, but that's the hardest thing to do.

Whatever makes you laugh is fine, and all we can do as comedy professionals is try to steer you towards something that we think is a little better -- but not put you down or just perplex you in the process.

My wife and I don't have kids and people are down on us about it. But we're just not wired that way, so don't tell me I have to.

For years, it's driven me crazy that women don't have better roles, especially in comedies. I know so many funny women but I always felt... misogynist streak is too strong a term -- but a dismissiveness.

I've always enjoyed people studying themselves in the mirror, and I also enjoy those 'walk and feel bad' shots. I like anything that isolates people and focuses them on themselves, or makes us focus on their faces as they're going through something.

In my years of acting, the one thing I was never able to do convincingly was to laugh on camera. Fake-laugh.

The dueling maturity levels in high school is such a source of comedy to me. I was always such a late developer. I was last to walk. I was last to ride a bike. I was last to have sex. That's why it's fun to portray one side of your childhood onscreen.

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 always feel in improv that nothing is ever as good once it's repeated.

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.

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.

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.

The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.

At the end of the day the question comes, what are you doing for the world? You have to try to do something that's going to add something positive.

Every director should take an acting class.

You want a happy ending, but not such a ridiculous happy ending that it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

I'm just always a bit thrown when, in the immediate aftermath of some event which makes us feel like either God's out to get us or He's not doing His job as well as He can, we all still get together and continue to ask Him for help.

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.'

Throughout my teens, I just wanted to go somewhere I could wear a Donald Duck pin and no one would care.

Hey, I'm like the Wayne Gretsky of the entertainment biz -- I have other people do my dirty work while I skate around and get to be a nice guy. What can I say? I'm a coward.

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic.