Top 100 Patton Oswalt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You have to be ruthless with yourself, in terms of being honest about what is working and what is not.”

— Patton Oswalt

2. “So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.’”

— Patton Oswalt

3. “I fantasize and idealize myself as Bugs Bunny, but I know deep down I’m Daffy Duck.”

— Patton Oswalt

4. “If you hit a midget on the head with a stick, he turns into 40 gold coins.”

— Patton Oswalt

5. “We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.”

— Patton Oswalt

6. “There’s something kind of beautiful about that pure love of things. Like, “I’ll show that I love the thing I love by hating everything else.””

— Patton Oswalt

7. “I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out if me with steel pipes.”

— Patton Oswalt

Featured in: Romance Quotes

8. “Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more.”

— Patton Oswalt

9. “We need conservatives that can accept gays, and then we need hippies that can shave and bathe.”

— Patton Oswalt

10. “Somebody is going to find a way digitally that is just as innovative. In the end, the tools can change, but there is always someone who can think of something cool to do.”

— Patton Oswalt

11. “Vincent van Gogh was a “tormented genius” the way Jimi Hendrix was a “guitar player.” I.”

— Patton Oswalt

12. “The Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation made a bobble head of me and sent it to my management. No card, nothing.”

— Patton Oswalt

13. “Is it bad when you refer to all alcohol as “Pain Go Bye-Bye Juice”?”

— Patton Oswalt

14. “I have a very tiny house in Burbank. I drive an 8-year-old car. I’m gonna drive it into the ground. I enjoy what I enjoy.”

— Patton Oswalt

15. “You can be an amateur and have a passion for something, but it takes a long time to actually become a professional, meaning that you can handle any situation.”

— Patton Oswalt

16. “I’m still very much an atheist, except that I don’t necessarily see religion as being a bad thing. So, that’s a weird thing that I’m struggling with that seems to be offending both atheists and people that are religious.”

— Patton Oswalt

17. “I love the beginning of Magnolia, the thing about the dealer. That scene is genius. Brilliantly acted.”

— Patton Oswalt

18. “I think right now is the best time for stand-up, ever. I sincerely do.”

— Patton Oswalt

19. “What you want to worship above youth, I think, is beauty, and beauty is so beyond just appearances after a while. Because you can be with someone who’s good-looking; if they open their mouths and they’re an idiot, then they cease to be beautiful very quickly.”

— Patton Oswalt

20. “I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.”

— Patton Oswalt

21. “George Bush is not stupid. He’s evil. OK? There’s a huge difference between stupid and evil.”

— Patton Oswalt

22. “Based on my own experience, when you’re going through adolescence you don’t know how the world works. You can’t set a story in the world you live in because you don’t know what a utility bill is, or how to budget your paycheck.”

— Patton Oswalt

23. “A lot of nerds aren’t aware they’re nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, ‘I speak Klingon – who am I fooling? You win! I’m just gonna openly like what I like.’ Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.”

— Patton Oswalt

24. “Lot of ugly funny dudes end up with some pretty gorgeous women. Women are much deeper than us in choosing a mate – they see in the long term.”

— Patton Oswalt

25. “Having enough money has to go hand in hand with living in a way that you’re not being a slave to your possessions.”

— Patton Oswalt

26. “Meal isn’t over when I’m full. Meal’s over when I hate myself.”

— Patton Oswalt

27. “People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald’s hash brown if it’s all they’ve got.”

— Patton Oswalt

28. “Stand-up is something I just truly love to do, so I’ll always go back to it. I’ll never stop doing it, that’s for sure.”

— Patton Oswalt

29. “Anything’s better than Gen X which is what we got. Thanks Douglas Coupland. We sound like a team of mutant vigalantees with frosted hair and chain wallets. Actually that’s not completely horrible.”

— Patton Oswalt

30. “Growing up, there are always those kids who are only happy when they are making someone else upset. That is unfortunately just how some people are. And their parents were fine. Some people are just born with bad wiring.”

— Patton Oswalt

31. “I’m not familiar with the metric system.”

— Patton Oswalt

32. “90% of every art form is garbage – dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that’s good, suck it up, and drive on.”

— Patton Oswalt

33. “Knowing comedy is knowing human nature.”

— Patton Oswalt

34. “Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, ‘This is where I wanna be.’”

— Patton Oswalt

35. “There are times when I have to take, I call it a ‘silence bath,’ where I shut off all of the external gadgets. I go walk around, talk to people, and just live life for a while.”

— Patton Oswalt

36. “I grew up in such a featureless, personality-less suburb. There was nothing to push against.”

— Patton Oswalt

37. “Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you.”

— Patton Oswalt

38. “As you get older, as a comedian, and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.”

— Patton Oswalt

39. “I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.”

— Patton Oswalt

40. “It wasn’t until I went to college and met different people from different areas of life – and then went to San Francisco and met people who really knew who the hell they were – that I kind of caught up in a hurry.”

— Patton Oswalt

41. “As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.”

— Patton Oswalt

42. “Now we live in this DVD, iTunes, Hulu age, and show creators and networks are realizing that and letting shows develop on those terms rather than ‘We gotta just punch it week to week, man.’ Now they’re like, ‘What will happen if someone watches the entire show?’”

— Patton Oswalt

43. “You saw a lot of guys, especially in the early ’90s, whose acts were a pitch for a sitcom. A lot of them were very funny, but there’s nothing worse than watching comedians or musicians who are up there and are doing something they’re not interested in.”

— Patton Oswalt

44. “If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.”

— Patton Oswalt

45. “If Kevin James or Paul Giamatti drop weight, I’m done. I don’t want to be the last pudge out there.”

— Patton Oswalt

46. “Every audience is different, even within the same venue. You have to just make every audience your audience; you can’t pre-judge an audience based on the size of the room or the type of room.”

— Patton Oswalt

47. “I’ve been very lucky in my life in terms of people who are able to tolerate me.”

— Patton Oswalt

48. “There is a part of my generation that is not on social media because they have happy lives and they’re not trying to connect with anybody. And there are other people who are on social media because they need to connect.”

— Patton Oswalt

49. “In my mind, I was always a comedian who was going to branch into writing.”

— Patton Oswalt

50. “It’s the method of consumption, not what’s on the plate.”

— Patton Oswalt