Quotes & Jokes by Paul Reiser / page 4
So we’re on this plane, and across the aisle from us was another couple, about our age, traveling with their two children - a two-year-old girl and a very new boy who, though tiny in stature, had a crying scream so piercing, it was annoying people on other planes.
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.
They don't see that whole pattern. Worm/death. Worm/death. I would catch on.
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.
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.
The biggest thing I remember is that there was just no transition. You hit the ground diapering.
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!"
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.
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.
She kind of reminds one of Helen. There's something very similar about Elizabeth Perkins.
I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.
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.
The most challenging part of being a dad is trying to postpone the moment when they realize you don't know anything. I love any sentence that begins with "Daddy...?" because it's implied they're looking up to you - that you'll have the answer. The truth is, I don't have any answers.
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."