Top 66 Ari Graynor Quotes

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.

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

I think ‘Nick and Norah’ was a huge deal for me. It was my first foray into the studio world, and that character was such a gift.

I was the girl who got out of my athletic requirement by managing the boys’ sports teams. Which is pretty ingenious, because when I was a sophomore, I got a prom date out of it. That was really strong planning on my part.

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.

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.

There’s pressure to come up with something genius every time. I feel like I keep letting myself down with my Twitter posts. I have to start keeping a journal of rough drafts of prophetic ideas about the world.

When you’re having a good time working on something, and you all like each other, it shows in ways that you don’t even realize.

A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.

I’m an only child, and in college, I was given a single, and then I lived with people for, like, two years but were my best friends, and we had a really fun time. And then I lived alone or with a boyfriend. I’ve never really had a bad roommate situation.

Not one person has ever sent me a drink because I was Caroline in ‘Nick and Norah.’ People reference it; people say really nice things about it, but I was sure I would be getting more free drinks.

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’ve been calling myself ‘just an actor’ since I was 6 years old. That’s a long time.

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

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

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.

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

I’ve done a bunch of Broadway, so I’m a theater nerd when I come to New York.

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.

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.’

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.

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?

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

When I was kid, I couldn’t wait to take the world by storm, to be a woman – beautiful, powerful, confident, sexy, thoughtful, and deep. All the things I knew I was inside… even though I was only 4.

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

There’s a lot of schlock out there.

I did babysit a little bit when I was young. I prefer babysitting for babies. I always loved babies. I was not as great with kids that wanted to be entertained and that wanted to talk.

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

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

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

I feel like I’m sort of afraid to study too much because I feel like I work as I go, but I want to study the classics and also the technical aspects of things. I’m always looking to understand more.

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

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.

Don’t believe anything you read on Wikipedia!

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.

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

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 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.

People remember the last thing you did.

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.

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

Our everyday lives exist with comedy and tragedy next to each other.

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.

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.

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

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.

No one’s up in arms about these PG-13 movies where it’s literally about the end of the world.

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

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

I think the world of comedy is a relatively small community, and especially for women in comedy, there just aren’t that many people involved.

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

Henry Winkler is the most lovable man. He is like everybody’s favorite grandfather.

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

Sitting around with Jim Carrey, coming up with bits, is, like, beyond a dream come true.

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.

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

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.

I didn’t want to study theater or go to school in the city. I wanted the all-American ‘Here’s your quad’ college experience.

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.’