Top 33 Kumail Nanjiani Quotes

I know what is funny coming out of my mouth and what is not funny coming out of my mouth. You have to figure out, What is the joke that I can do that nobody else can do?

You just don’t see Muslims being matter-of-fact Muslim. They’re always defined by their Muslim-ness. We’re either terrorists, or we’re fighting terrorists. I remember seeing ‘True Lies’ and going, ‘Why are we always the bad guys?’

I never really got into game shows. The easiest one is ‘Wheel Of Fortune’ because you just have to know words, and for the most part everyone knows words.

TV requires a lot more patience. No one’s ever like, ‘I gotta get up at 5 A.M. and write my stand-up!’ It’s an easy life. With ‘Silicon Valley,’ it’s long hours and very unglamorous.

I’m still trying to figure out how to have an adult relationship with my parents.

My parents don’t really understand my career. They don’t really bring it up that much.

I was actually looking at the poster for ‘Tarzan,’ and I was thinking how abs look so different now. These are not your grandma’s abs. They go so deep and so sharp now.

I still don’t have a real appreciation for music because I didn’t really start listening to it until my 20s. My wife knows everything about music, and I try and get her to educate me, but it’s just not part of my DNA.

Rom-coms have been one of my favorite genres of movies since I can remember. My favorite movie of all-time is ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral,’ and then ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ and ‘Annie Hall’ is top five.

I don’t want to generalize, but the target audience for a lot of the YouTube people is fairly young – under the age of 16. You still want to know what those people are watching, because I think it’s interesting, but sometimes it just makes you feel old.

Most people don’t really do too many things because they’re afraid they’ll fail. There are people failing all the time, all around you. And nobody is going to notice your failure. Your failure is not going to be so spectacular that people write news stories about it. Your failure will be boring.

Nobody really knows what they’re doing. Some are just better at pretending like they do.

I always felt that it was never the duty of a person to really stand up for their gender or their race or anything like that – I always felt that was a personal choice. But I do feel now that maybe my opinion is evolving or changing a little bit.

There was one week where I got mistaken for Hasan Minhaj, who is on ‘The Daily Show;’ Kunal Nayyar, who’s on ‘Big Bang Theory;’ and Karan Soni of ‘Ghostbusters.’ This was one week.

I know a lot of brown actors who play terrorists because they’re physically intimidating. For me, it was like, ‘O.K., you’ll be the nerd.’ So I’ve played the nerd. I’ve played food-delivery guys. But I always tried to find something in the characters so that they weren’t just defined by what they looked like.

When generally people make race-based jokes to me – even if they’re not technically racist, they’re sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever – on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context.

I have a reward-and-punishment system: If I have done this much work, then I can play video games this long. It gives my day structure.

I stay home. It’s the best place to be alone. There is hardly any walk-through traffic.

Stand-up is successful if they laugh. It’s unsuccessful if they don’t laugh.

The plan was always to come to America, because Pakistan’s a scary place. They don’t have religious freedom. It’s very poor, and there’s a lot of violence and corruption.

I want to be so famous that I’m the pop-culture reference that people would make to try and be racist to me. So I’d be walking down the street, and someone would be, like, ‘Hey, look at this Kumail Nanjiani.’

I’m from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor.

A lot of people say video games can be stifling. Older people say, ‘We had to go outside, and we had to make up stories!’ For me, video games broadened my horizons. Playing ‘Golden Axe,’ I was those characters. I imagined myself being in that world, so honestly, it was a really good thing.

Wikipedia is kind of weird. I feel it’s lame to put up my own page, but I desperately want someone else to do it.

My parents aren’t the demographic for a lot of things I do. If I did a stand-up show, and I saw 62-year-old Pakistanis in the crowd, I’d be like, ‘I’m gonna bomb.’

I’d love to be in action movies. I’ve been trying to convince people. I don’t think it’s anything physical holding me back. I think it’s a general vibe thing that’s holding me back. I don’t project action confidence, maybe.

The worst job I ever had was an office job that I had for six years, and that’s nothing against the people who I was surrounded by, because they were wonderful people.

Because of the Internet, you’re sort of forced to deal with people from very different backgrounds and beliefs. It’s a great challenge of our time, and depending on when you ask me, I feel optimistic or pessimistic about it.

I would say I try to make my comedy really personal. I try to tell stories that happened to me, experiences from my life.

You really need to have that discipline. It’s not even discipline. I just put down these rules. It’s not like a vague, ‘Motivate yourself!’ and do something. It’s specific hours set aside every day for certain things.

Honestly, I would love to be friends with Fox Mulder on ‘The X-Files.’ That’s almost a little too obvious, but that would be my answer. I’d love to hang out with him.

I started a podcast about ‘X-Files’ and ended up on it. Then I started a podcast about video games, and I’m in the new ‘Mass Effect’ game. I have to pick the stuff I love and do a podcast on it.

My mom told us never to reveal that we were Shia in school. You would find out that some other kid was Shiite, and you would whisper, ‘Hey,’ or you would see someone at the mosque, and you’d be like, ‘Hey, that kid’s Shiite!’ There was a lot of tension, a lot of violence in Karachi between Shiites and Sunnis.