Top 70 Ari Graynor Quotes

I’ve started to get more stage fright the older I get.

I think a reason why actors get reputations for being crazy and neurotic is because your life task is constantly in flux.

Numb3rs’ was a wonderful gift because I had not worked in six months. It was so fun to be on that set doing these crazy things.

When you look at all of the male characters on television and in film, it’s not like every one of them are the people doing the right thing that you can point to as your own moral compass. We need to have all kinds of characters represented.

I love to cook for people. I equate food with love.

I’ve always sort of felt like I was from another time. The ’70s is more my vibe. The clothes fit me better.

I’m not nearly as brave and confident in some of the ways that I think stand-ups are.

Don’t believe anything you read on Wikipedia!

You know what no one tells you about driving a truck? You are driving a truck. There are only side mirrors, and it does not handle like a Prius.

It took me a solid four or five years to feel really comfortable in front of the camera.

There’s a lot of schlock out there.

The language can be different, but the emotional lives are the same no matter whether you’re doing Shakespeare or Stoppard or something else… The emotional life is all the same.

Comedy is funny when it comes from truth, and that’s always the rule of them. It’s about how far you can push that boundary.

Sometimes you can get stuck doing the same kind of thing over and over again, and then there’s a certain moment in your life when you say, ‘Wait, there’s all this other stuff in me and all this other life.’

My deepest fear about doing TV, especially about doing a network comedy, was what if it felt too surface-y? What if it felt too jokey?

I was the kind of kid that always loved babies. I was, you know, four years old, and I would have my baby doll that I would bring with me everywhere and fake breastfeed on the beach and diaper.

Twitter’s a lot of work! That’s the first thing I would say. There’s so much pressure to be funny.

My worst nightmare when I was in school was that I would get into trouble. I never got in trouble. I was a good student.

You look at Richard Pryor and Robert Klein and George Carlin and Richard Lewis – those guys were so smart, they were the thinking-man stand-ups.

I went through a little hippy dippy program at Brandeis and was bat mizvahed by the rabbi who married my parents. We celebrated the High Holidays and had the traditional Rosh Hashanah dinner.

In high school, everyone told me I had a great personality and sense of humor, but I wanted to be the girl who boys liked because she was pretty on top of being funny. I was boy crazy.

It shouldn’t be an issue that we have a black president. Gay marriage shouldn’t be an issue. And women being funny shouldn’t be an issue.

I was playing a lot of bigger, sort-of-comedic characters in slightly heightened realities, and it had been so fun and fulfilling for a long time. But it got to a point where I just felt like I didn’t have that in me anymore.

I have the personality where, although my ego can be healthy, sometimes I also feel like people won’t remember me, or they won’t know who I am.

Humans are complex, and I think in entertainment in general, it’s very easy to put people in boxes.

It is mind-boggling to me that there are so few movies about female friendship, considering women make up half the movie-going population.

You can’t please everybody. All you can do is please yourself.

I started acting because it was essentially the way I needed to survive and equalize my inner life.

I’m such a theater geek. Most of my friends are in this community, and it’s really important for me to keep doing it. It takes the ego out of acting, whereas movies tend to involve it.

The worst thing you can have as an actor is too big an ego. It just kills creativity.

It is frustrating that people have a hard time telling other female stories besides, ‘Is she going to get the guy?’

For years, I said I didn’t want to do television. It was just a hard ‘no.’ I didn’t want to read anything. It didn’t matter what it was – it was just ‘no.’

By 12, my body had changed, although instead of blossoming into Cindy Mancini from ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ I more closely resembled Chunk from ‘The Goonies.’ My inside world may have been filled with a poetic and vital feminine life force, but the outside world saw and told me otherwise.

I prefer situational or character-based humor to gross-out gags and comedic set pieces.

As an actor, these kinds of big-comedic-centerpiece characters is just one thing that I love to do.

On stage, you have nothing to hide behind. It allows the work to live in a more organic place. It’s almost like a meditation. You have to go on that stage and be as present as possible.

I had been doing theater since I was a kid, so the stage really felt like home to me. It felt like the place where I trust myself the most in the world and felt the most confident.

I played a lot of dress-up in my room. I really liked being alone. I had a lot of friends, but I had an only-child, live-in-my-head personality.

I’ve had curly hair for years, and I never wore it curly. I didn’t know what to do with it.

More and more, people probably associate me in this world of comedy and these confident, brassy, big ladies, which I love, but my insides and who I feel like internally and the kind of work that I hope to continue doing feels very different from that.

I’ve always just admired women who were able to navigate through dramatic and comedic waters and sort of do it all.

The Bowery Hotel is always a great place to meet people for drinks. It’s so cozy in there, especially in the late fall and winter.

At the end of the day, if you’re an actor, you want to act. And it’s not something you can do in the living room alone. If you’re a painter, you can paint at home. If you write music, you can write on your own.

For all creative people, that’s sort of everyone’s journey. You feel something inside, and it takes a while to figure out what that looks like and what your voice is.

While I’m Jewish, the Hasidic world is still foreign to me. But I do understand some of the ideas of tradition and family and faith of our shared culture.

As an actor, there’s no faking it.

I was a precocious only child, and then I went through a fat, awkward stage for several years, so I learned to fall back on my humor and personality when I was growing up. It’s how you survive, so I think it was more of a natural progression for me, developing into comedy.

It’s an incredible thing when you are creating something in a moment with the other people on stage and with an audience, and you are all experiencing it together as it exists in that one night. It’s a magical feeling.

While I appreciate horror movies, I’d love the opportunity to do something transformative, especially because people see me as contemporary. There’s a lot to explore in my career that could take me back to another time. A period piece would be an incredible game of dress-up, too.

The only thing that I’m not willing to do is really stupid, horribly written sitcoms. It can be tempting during pilot season time, but I realized this a while ago when I almost signed my life away to a stupid pilot.

I want the power that comes from expressing myself creatively and putting something back into the world. Being someone’s muse would be flattering, but it could get old fast.

My mom was in the chorus of ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘The Worldly Players’; my dad would build the set.

I’m a little quirky, a little offbeat, and I’m certainly not a classic beauty.

I was more of the kind of babysitter that liked holding the baby, sort of playing Mom, and then putting the baby to bed and watching TV while eating everything in their kitchen.

The real heart of comedy is uncovering a truth about yourself or about the world that you didn’t see.

The truth is, there are so few female roles in movies. That’s really limiting. As an actor, you wanna be able to sink your teeth into something. You don’t want to just be the best friend. You don’t want to just be the girlfriend.

Acting was the place where I could be free and feel confident.

As a kid, I watched a lot of TV.

I think it’s important to have goals and to have dreams, but you also have to live in the moment of what the reality is.

When I was a kid, I did dial the 900 numbers out of curiosity, but I was such a goodie-two-shoes that I immediately hung up because I didn’t want it showing up on the bill.

Women care about their friends.

I’ve been really interested and inspired by Nan Goldin, the photographer.

I would love to be doing more voice-over work. It’s such a fun and free playground to take risks, play around, and get sort of ridiculous.

I started acting when I was seven, so I’ve read my share.

I love being onstage. As I’ve gotten older, it terrifies me more and more, which is interesting.

You can only really hear the beat of your own drum if you give yourself the space to sit in it.

Onstage was where I felt the most confident and in control and free, and as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten more and more daunting. And I think that’s also part of my desire to keep confronting that and pushing through to find that childlike or youthful ignorance against fear and keep at it.

Part of doing good work is caring deeply about it, believing in what you’re doing, and getting incredibly attached to the characters that you’re playing, the stories you’re telling, and the people you’re working with.

I think most people have experienced that at some point: being on one end or the other of a super-unbalanced relationship.

If I’m gonna stay in this world of comedy, then it has to be a really special character to me in a really smart piece of material.