Patton Oswalt Quotes

I really do love doing stand-up, and I don't see why it should affect the acting. And I just want more interesting jobs. I just want to keep doing stuff that's different, rather than saying, "Okay, I've become known for this, and I'll just do this from now on." If I feel like I've done this one thing, I never want to do it again. I want to do something totally different.

I love taking on roles that I haven't yet done in my career.

I will always do stand-up, even if my acting career takes off. Stand-up is my life.

My dream as an actor growing up was always to challenge myself to different genres, different roles, and it's actually rare that an actor's given that opportunity to do that.

When I do stand-up for a long time, I'll get burned out, then I'll get an acting gig. For me, the grass is always greener. I'd like to do a mixture of all of it. My goal is just to do small movies that I've written. That's what I'm trying to do now, just write smaller movies.

As an actor, I just want to keep mixing it up.

I don't want to build any image for myself. I don't want people to say, 'He does only a certain type of role.' I don't want only to be the hero of the story. An actor's weakness is the different roles that he can't do. But I am keen to grab only those roles as I am here to challenge myself.

I'm glad I'm getting to do interesting films.

One of the things I have loved so much about the career that I have had is that pretty much every character I have played is diametrically opposite to the one before it.

Certain jobs [films] are for the business really, because they get an audience, they get a global audience. Certain jobs are as an artist. If I can keep moving forward and strike some form of balance between them two, then I'm going to feel content.

The cliché about young actors is that they want to diversify the work that they do to show their range, but it's true. Or at least, for me, I want to keep doing different stuff; doing different work, you see different things.

I can work as a writer, but I wanted to do stand-up.

I still do my comedy and my performance stuff and my acting so it's not all-consuming. But I do find myself drawing more and more these days.

And although I've been very fortunate in the film work that's come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I'm away for a maximum of two years, I feel something's wrong.

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.

I think the thing that I always try to do - because it piques my interest - is to play really different parts all the time.

As far as developing a career as an actress, I think it's a fine balance between trying to just work, and also be true to yourself.

If you look at my body of work, my characters drastically vary, and so I typically don't play the same role. It makes me feel reborn with each role.

I mean, you know actors, we always want to do something else, something different.

I would like to continue making music and acting in projects that give me a lot of satisfaction.

The goal is to divide my time between stage and film.

Before I started doing '30 Rock', I did about 25 movies. I'd always been doing stand-up every night, and then I would do, like, two to four movies a year. So I really liked doing that, and I want to get back to that, but because of the time commitment to '30 Rock', there's not much time to do that stuff.

I think it's an actor's responsibility to change every time. Not only for himself and the people he's working with, but for the audience. If you just go out and deliver the same dish every time... it's meat loaf again... you'd get bored. I'd get bored.

Once I started doing stand-up, everything fell into place. That was when I started acting more; I felt like I'd found my place in the business.

For me, as an actor, just to keep acting and to keep being able to work and to do different roles and challenging roles, that's something I'd love to do.