Top 75 Bill Hader Quotes

I would do ‘Superbad,’ and the next offers you would get would all be crazy cop characters or crazy security guards or something.

I was always self-conscious about the fact that I didn’t have as much comedy experience as other people at ‘SNL,’ and I kept thinking they were going to realize they’d made a mistake by hiring me.

I was in a sketch group in L.A., and we were playing, like, backyards in Glendale and stuff. It was pretty ugly because we didn’t have any money.

I worked at a movie theater in Tempe, Arizona, when I went to community college there. And I got fired because a sorority had rented out a theater to watch ‘Titanic,’ and they were being really rude to me while they were waiting for the movie. So as I tore their tickets, I told them the end of the movie.

I moved out to L.A. to be a filmmaker or director. I didn’t even think about doing comedy or even acting. I wanted to be like Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, but I wasn’t going to a lot of comedy.

When people tell you what doesn’t work, they’re usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re usually wrong.

Comedy is incredibly hard. You have to be loose. You have to be not afraid to fail.

When you’re performing, you’re playing to the back row. With acting, you have to be more nuanced.

You learn quickly at ‘SNL’ you get in trouble if you compare yourself to other people, where they’re at, or what other people had done before you.

If I get a chance to write a comic book or do a voice in an Adult Swim show, I do it. It’s much more fulfilling to me and I get to work with people who I’m a fan of.

Seth Meyers and I wrote a ‘Spider-Man’ comic.

The first time I met James Franco, he was dressed like James Dean. He was James Dean, literally, filming a biopic.

Getting ‘SNL’ was pretty amazing, so just to be able to have an eight-year career there and be really happy with everything I did, it was pretty big.

For our anniversary, my wife and I went to see Godzilla, and then we ate at Barnyard Venice, and it was like, ‘We are crazy! The Kardashians have to keep up with us!’

I’m never going to say, ‘Well, I’m never going to do comedy again.’ I love comedies, and it’s what people know me for, so I love doing it… I don’t really think about it in terms of ‘Well, I should do this because it’s comedy or drama.’

I met Robin Williams a few times, and he was a beautiful guy.

I grew up in a total Pink Floyd house.

I was never that good on stage with live improv. I was much better on film or writing something and then thinking about it. I was too in my head when I was on stage.

The first time I ever acted was in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in high school, and my first line was, ‘I didn’t know Shakespeare had a sister.’

In the U.S., it’s like, you start with a great script, and then on set – not everybody, but definitely in the Apatow group – you go off, and you’re improvising on camera. So while you’re on camera, you’re saying things that no one else has ever heard before during the actual take.

I – at the table reads, I break constantly. If something is up there that I’m not expecting, I tend to – I can’t help myself; I’ll start laughing.

Sometimes you’re working with somebody, and you can tell they’re just waiting to say their line.

I got invited to the Playboy Mansion with the Lonely Island guys after their first season on ‘SNL,’ and I sat in the corner drinking coffee and talking to Akiva Schaffer about what aspect ratio he was going to shoot ‘Hot Rod’ in. Like, that’s what we talk about.

I was offered a lot of supporting crazy parts in comedies because that’s all I had done.

I grew up with my two sisters and my mom, so it’s my lot in life to be surrounded by women.

When I was on ‘SNL,’ I was getting weirdly anxious about being on camera, which I had never really done before. And so my solution was just to not watch my stuff. And then I found out that other actors do it, too, and I felt less weird about it.

Pete Davidson – he’s in the movie ‘Trainwreck.’ He has a small part in it. I told Lorne Michaels about him, said he was really funny.

Good directors give short and specific instructions to their actors.

Jon Ronson makes me laugh. I’ve read all of his books.

I never resented anybody for being successful.

I’m the only one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that has Final Draft on my computer. Then you show up and go to any coffee shop in L.A., and there are a hundred people your age with Final Draft.

Oddly enough, I have really bad stage fright – getting up in front of people. And I made a living going on live television.

My wife and I were on our honeymoon in Turks and Caicos, in the middle of nowhere, and I’m sitting on this deserted beach, and I see one lone person walking along the shore. He walks right up to me and says, ‘I love ‘Laser Cats,’ and then just walks away.

Paul Rudd is a huge ‘Hot Rod’ fan.

I’m a huge fan of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

I kind of romanticized what it was like to be a writer and director when I was in my early twenties. Working as a production assistant knocked that right out of me.

I don’t believe in the term ‘guilty pleasure,’ because it implies I should feel ashamed for liking something. A real guilty pleasure would be, I don’t know, taking gratification in some stranger‘s ghastly death or something – which I guess I do enjoy, because I read a ton of true crime.

Top Ten lists make me insane. I just know they’re going to change daily.

When it comes to comedy, it might be interesting to know why an airplane works, but really? Maybe it’s better not to know why certain things work. Just fly the thing, and if nothing falls apart, you’ll be fine.

I like when you are telling a story and fall into an impression.

I wrote a fan e-mail to Michael Chabon.

In ‘Winter‘s Bone,’ it’s literally the director and the camera operator. That’s it. Just a super-small Kubrick crew. You know what I mean? Like, 8 people.

I’m crazy lucky. I was trying to be a filmmaker. I was doing Second City classes as a way to be creative. I was a PA for a long time. I was working as an assistant editor on ‘Iron Chef America‘ when I got ‘SNL.’ It was one of those situations where you’re concentrating in one thing and the peripheral thing popped.

‘SNL’ is really hard to do when you’re single and living alone. And then it’s pretty tough when you’re married, because you don’t see your spouse.

There’s a movie called ‘Pod People’ that has a weird little anteater alien. That was a good alien.

‘The State‘ was a huge thing for me. I watched that and ‘SNL’ together when I was 15, 16.

One of the reasons I started working at ‘South Park,’ actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

When I got to ‘Saturday Night Live,’ it was a lot like going from pre-school to Harvard, and it took a long time to figure stuff out.

If you can’t forgive yourself, you think you’re never going to be able to forgive yourself, and you repeat the same behavior.

I had a small part in ‘Pineapple Express.’

I remember I could do – I did Bart Simpson once on the bus. I did, like, a really good Bart Simpson voice on the bus, obviously before I hit puberty. And everybody went, ‘Whoa, that sounds just like Bart Simpson.’

I don’t think I could do what Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood or Ben Stiller do, where they direct a movie and they star in it. I would just be like, ‘Oh, I don’t even want to look at my face.’

I collect movies. So I have all those in binders. I don’t have the DVDs out. I put them in binders.

My wife and I got to go onstage at a Flaming Lips concert at Webster Hall once. We dressed up like Scientology aliens and danced around. We had a shootout onstage with Santa Claus.

I loved growing up in Tulsa.

I like watching Kate McKinnon do something – there’s a joy in seeing a new move from somebody and going, ‘Oh, she can do that.’

The nature of ‘SNL’ is that it’s so in-the-moment.

Fred Armisen does a pretty good me.

I was a production assistant in the post department on ‘The Surreal Life.’ And it’s been reported before that I was an assistant editor on ‘The Surreal Life.’ That is not true.

I’m very close to my sisters.

I hated pitch meetings. Pitch meetings were my least favorite part of the week. I just gave up. I was so terrible at them.

A person being patient with an insane person is my favorite thing in the world.

I remember seeing ‘Spinal Tap‘ at a young age and being like, ‘That’s how you perform comedy.’

I work a lot, and it’s kind of like, you meet people, and you just click. It’s not like I’m looking at something and thinking: ‘South Park‘ – how do I get on that?’ I just became friends with those guys first. They’re nice guys.

You can be the lead in a movie just for the sake of being a lead in a movie, or you can just be in a good movie.

It doesn’t occur to me that I don’t drive a cool car until I hang out with Jon Hamm, who picks me up in what looks like a Transformer, and I think, ‘Oh, that’s what movie stars are driving. I guess I’m not a movie star.’

Turns out typecasting is a real thing.

My dad was a big Frank Zappa fan, so I remember listening to a lot of Frank Zappa. Girls do not like Frank Zappa.

Let’s face it: I look pretty out of shape.

My wife is the sweetest, most even-keeled person ever. A mood swing to her is like, ‘Oh, I’m uncomfortable.’

When ‘MacGruber’ came out, David Wain was one of the first people who publicly championed it.

To be totally honest? I don’t know if I’ll keep doing more impressions. People told me I had a facility for it, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m the impression guy.’ So you imagine the cast at ‘SNL’ is an A-Team, and you’ve got the explosives guy, and I’m the impression guy.

You know what, I remember being on my T-ball team and telling people about ‘Platoon.’

When I met Judd Apatow, he told me I should start writing screenplays. They’d be really bad at first, but the more I did it, the better I’d get.

Las Vegas, New Mexico has had a lot of great movies shot there.