Top 80 Mike Birbiglia Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “High school is not unlike a Mormon fundamentalist cult where the women are claimed by the older and more powerful.”

— Mike Birbiglia

52. “Sometimes, when you want to be in a place so badly, you’ll do anything.”

— Mike Birbiglia

53. “Essentially, retweets are like laughs.”

— Mike Birbiglia

54. “Fortunately, I don’t talk about politics on stage.”

— Mike Birbiglia

55. “I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.””

— Mike Birbiglia

56. “I’m a big fan of pastries the size of a baby that contain enough calories for a year. That seems like an effective use of time.”

— Mike Birbiglia

57. “I feel like everyone wants to make a movie that they feel passionate about watching.”

— Mike Birbiglia

58. “You need to know what doesn’t work to know what works. It’s especially true in improv and stand-up.”

— Mike Birbiglia

59. “Eugene Mirman is the Andy Warhol of comedy. People look to him for what’s next in comedy, and he emails these people back promptly. The Will to Whatevs put me in a great mood because I was laughing out loud. Alone. That’s hard to do.”

— Mike Birbiglia

60. “Comedy unites, it doesn’t divide!”

— Mike Birbiglia

61. “I’m a compulsive everything.”

— Mike Birbiglia

62. “This is my situation. I’m the kind of person who, for fun, writes articles called ‘Aviation Club Soars into Orbit!’ and an unhappy bully I’ve never heard of is sending out envoys.”

— Mike Birbiglia

63. “I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.”

— Mike Birbiglia

64. “The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short.”

— Mike Birbiglia

65. “I like films that are so funny, dramatic and lifelike simultaneously, that you are laughing and cringing simultaneously all throughout the film.”

— Mike Birbiglia

66. “My problem with being in New York City is that you really can’t make a living as a comedian. You can, but you have to also take writing jobs, which means less stage time.”

— Mike Birbiglia

67. “Writing is always a process of trial and error, but this was writing about my own errors, so the errors felt compounded, like I was re-living my own mistakes and failing at that too.”

— Mike Birbiglia

68. “That one’s yours and that one’s mine.” Like we’re cars. And I don’t feel like I’ve ever been one of the good cars. No one’s ever seen me and said, “I get that one!” They’re more like, “I get that one? Um, okay.” Or even, “I get that one? You owe me.” It’s so sad to think that people are incurring debt based on my appearance. I’d hate to hurt someone’s credit score. So.”

— Mike Birbiglia

69. “I take the subway four times a day, or close to it. I just love the subway! My grandfather worked as an electrician when they were digging the subway.”

— Mike Birbiglia

70. “Growing up, I was a big fan of the Indiana Jones movies. I watched them again recently and found them to be misleading. Aspiring archeologists across the world probably show up to their first day of work with their weather-worn fedoras and their whips and they’re like, “Where’s the cavern of jewels?” And their boss is like, “Actually, today we’re gonna start off by dusting thousands of miles of nothing.”

— Mike Birbiglia

71. “Well, I’m not sure what happened next, but I ended up peeing on Mrs. Jarvis’s lawn.”

— Mike Birbiglia

72. “I shouldn’t say bad things about the illiterate, though... I should write it.”

— Mike Birbiglia

73. “This book is an experiment. We figured it out as we went along. Sort of like a family.”

— Mike Birbiglia

74. “A joke should never end with “I’m joking.”

— Mike Birbiglia

75. “The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.”

— Mike Birbiglia

76. “People getting along doesn’t sell very well in the news. I find that to be deeply depressing. I don’t even talk about it on stage, because it would take too long to explain.”

— Mike Birbiglia

77. “If you’re terrible, you can write everybody off, like, “I don’t know what the hell those idiots are doing?” I knew what those idiots were doing. And I knew that they did it better than me. In.”

— Mike Birbiglia

78. “Aging is like climbing to the top of a mountain and then you either jump off and die or inch your way down until you fall to your death. I never imagined the inching part, just the climbing.”

— Mike Birbiglia

79. “I think the reason why I’m so alluring to networks is because on the surface I’m like a quintessential relatable, boring white guy. A great many sitcoms have been anchored by a boring white guy, so I feel like what they want to mine from me are my more generic qualities.”

— Mike Birbiglia

80. “We joke about things we’re most anxious about to diffuse the anxiety of the actual threat.”

— Mike Birbiglia

81. “Jokes have been ruined by people who aren’t good at telling jokes.”

— Mike Birbiglia

82. “A joke without comedic timing is a statement of pure insanity.”

— Mike Birbiglia

83. “Pizza is a Band Aid for so many problems.”

— Mike Birbiglia

84. “My brain is like a Snapple cap. It can hold one piece of information at a time.”

— Mike Birbiglia

85. “Cynical is: The glass is half empty. Skeptical is more like: Is that even a glass? Is this even water?”

— Mike Birbiglia

86. “I think of prayers like tech support. Unless I get a person live on the phone, I’m not sure it’s getting to anybody.”

— Mike Birbiglia