Top 80 Paul Feig Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I couldn’t be happier to not be acting. I miss it, but I don’t miss the auditioning or trying to get work.”

— Paul Feig

2. “You want a happy ending, but not such a ridiculous happy ending that it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”

— Paul Feig

3. “At the end of the day, I just want a movie that’s great, that people are going to love and laugh at and be affected by, and also have an emotional journey.”

— Paul Feig

4. “I’m kind of a failure. I mean, I’ll be honest. I’m successful in that I’m getting to work on great stuff, but I think I’m a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.”

— Paul Feig

5. “That’s what I love about the mockumentary style, is the added thing of people knowing they are on-camera, which changes your behavior. That’s why we sometimes do what we call spy shots.”

— Paul Feig

6. “I don’t like weddings. I never have. I find moments in them I really like, but I always look at them like, “Oh my God, we have to go to a wedding.” My problem with weddings is that they are just too long.”

— Paul Feig

7. “My wife and I don’t have kids and people are down on us about it. But we’re just not wired that way, so don’t tell me I have to.”

— Paul Feig

8. “I can’t impress enough upon people that if you tell an honest story that people relate to and people believe and invest in, you can do anything.”

— Paul Feig

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

9. “I don’t want to do anything to revisit Freaks and Geeks that isn’t awesome.”

— Paul Feig

10. “What’s so great about working with really funny women is that vanity comes second. Whatever makes it real and funny, they’re going to go for, and it’s just great.”

— Paul Feig

11. “Everyone takes pause at 40. It’s the age you have to assess everything in your life. It’s the fictitious marker that’s always coming up when you’re young. The world really does look at you to kind of have it together by 40, and be successful by 40. Whatever success means.”

— Paul Feig

12. “I’m glad I took the leap away from acting into going behind the camera because it’s much more satisfying – I love acting and I still do, but it’s much more satisfying to be able to make the stuff.”

— Paul Feig

13. “Women comedy is different than men comedy. Guy comedy is very aggressive, it’s about insulting each other, name-calling, and kind of busting each other’s chops, and that’s not what women’s comedy is.”

— Paul Feig

14. “I love funny people, and when I’m with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, ‘Hey let me tell you a joke.’”

— Paul Feig

15. “With a suit, even if you’re having a nervous breakdown, you still look like you’re in charge.”

— Paul Feig

16. “Bad women’s comedies are made by men who didn’t consult enough women.”

— Paul Feig

17. “I mean Ally McBeal was sort of the closest thing I can think of to kind of being a comedy-drama but that had its own kind of style that meant it got kind of big sometimes. But it was a great show.”

— Paul Feig

18. “You can never have a thousand percent batting average on jokes – it’s just never going to happen.”

— Paul Feig

19. “Whatever you wear, you have to own it. Make it yours.”

— Paul Feig

20. “I’m not looking for people to bow down to me or do things in my name or even pass around a collection plate for me. I say that I’d like to be God for a while because He really can get away with anything. I mean, ANYTHING.”

— Paul Feig

21. “You just have to be classy at the end of the day. That doesn’t mean you can’t go with a midnight blue tux. And if you can find a deep red tux that looks classy and classic, I think you can pull it off.”

— Paul Feig

22. “I always feel in improv that nothing is ever as good once it’s repeated.”

— Paul Feig

23. “I find that so many times when somebody tries to go back in, it sort of isn’t as good and you wish they hadn’t done it.”

— Paul Feig

24. “Period costume films are fun to discover, but they’re not relatable. It’s more, ‘Wow, that’s cool – did it really look like that back then?’ Whereas with a comedy, you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s me, that’s my friends.’ No matter what, I want people to relate.”

— Paul Feig

Featured in: Fun Quotes

25. “I was brought up in a very religious household and did a lot of praying throughout a big part of my life and always thought of God as being not only a powerful father figure and the ruler of all time and dimension but also as a friend with whom I could chat and ask questions to and get advice from.”

— Paul Feig

26. “Women’s humor seems to be a little more supportive. It’s just kind of trying to make the other one laugh through funny voices and kind of talking about other people. I respond to that. I feel less like I’m going to get beat up in a room full of women than I do in a room full of guys.”

— Paul Feig

27. “I hate that we’re always called “the all-female Ghostbusters,” because you wouldn’t refer to the original as “the all-male Ghostbusters.””

— Paul Feig

28. “In a perfect world, I’d love to make 90-minute movies, but for me, a movie needs to be as long or short as it can sustain itself.”

— Paul Feig

29. “Whatever makes you laugh is fine, and all we can do as comedy professionals is try to steer you towards something that we think is a little better – but not put you down or just perplex you in the process.”

— Paul Feig

30. “At the end of the day if you want to entertain people, you’ve got to take your ego out of the equation.”

— Paul Feig

31. “In my years of acting, the one thing I was never able to do convincingly was to laugh on camera. Fake-laugh.”

— Paul Feig

32. “At the end of the day the question comes, what are you doing for the world? You have to try to do something that’s going to add something positive.”

— Paul Feig

33. “Forty is the line of demarcation that says you’re an adult now. You’re an adult, so don’t pretend you’re a kid anymore.”

— Paul Feig

34. “Hey, I’m like the Wayne Gretsky of the entertainment biz – I have other people do my dirty work while I skate around and get to be a nice guy. What can I say? I’m a coward.”

— Paul Feig

35. “We didn’t used to be so precious about women in comedy back in the old days.”

— Paul Feig

36. “People are like, “Why are you all dressed up? Did you dress up just for me?” I’m like “No, I dressed up because I’m an adult and I felt like putting on my suit.” But I love it. Tom Ford and Ralph Lauren are my two heroes of clothing designers.”

— Paul Feig

37. “Throughout my teens, I just wanted to go somewhere I could wear a Donald Duck pin and no one would care.”

— Paul Feig

38. “The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.”

— Paul Feig

39. “I’m from Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It’s right outside Detroit. The suburbs. I was always very heavily involved in theater back then. I was always in drama club or forensics. Anything that you could do that had some performing, I was doing it.”

— Paul Feig

40. “The awards world can be ridiculous, but I’m not one to bash it. I love awards! When I’ve been nominated for Emmys and when I won my DGA Award, I couldn’t have been happier. I always liked getting a gold star in class.”

— Paul Feig

41. “I’ve never had to get a job as a waiter or anything. I’ve always been able to support myself in ‘the biz.’ Which is great. It’s really fantastic to be able to say that, because I know it’s hard to do.”

— Paul Feig

42. “There’s nothing worse than the sequel that’s a letdown from the first movie.”

— Paul Feig

43. “I’m extremely, extremely lucky to be who I am and do what I do and work with the people I work with. Even though I can always find something to complain about, I find it very hard to complain.”

— Paul Feig

44. “The reason most comedies don’t win awards is that the filmmakers put the comedy first. This means you have to create a story around the jokes.”

— Paul Feig

45. “I’ve always enjoyed people studying themselves in the mirror, and I also enjoy those ‘walk and feel bad’ shots. I like anything that isolates people and focuses them on themselves, or makes us focus on their faces as they’re going through something.”

— Paul Feig

46. “You need to have one element about your outfit that is imperfect, that says you live in it and you’re not letting it control you. I think men and women both need a softness about them with formal wear.”

— Paul Feig

47. “As a director, I really wanted to learn and I needed to get away from my own stuff to figure out how to just do things and work with good people.”

— Paul Feig

48. “What I don’t like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there’s no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don’t want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here’s the epiphany scene and then the movie’s over.”

— Paul Feig

49. “When I went to high school, in the late 1970s, disco was in full swing and anyone who was into it dressed the part. I know I did.”

— Paul Feig

50. “If you’re not connected emotionally to a story, then you’re dead. You’re really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.”

— Paul Feig