Patton Oswalt, born January 27, 1969, is a well-known American stand-up comedian and actor.
He’s best known for roles in “The King of Queens” and “The Goldbergs” and movies like “Ratatouille”.
He’s also made numerous TV guest appearances. His comedic talent earned him an Emmy and Grammy for the Netflix special “Talking for Clapping”.
Starting his stand-up journey in 1988 in Virginia, he later ventured into comic writing. Oswalt is a public atheist, political commentator and supporter of causes like PETA.
He was wed to true crime writer Michelle McNamara until her death in 2016 and is now married to actress Meredith Salenger.
I have picked the top quotes by Patton Oswalt for you.
Best Patton Oswalt Quotes
I hate all sidekicks. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I think right now is the best time for stand-up, ever. I sincerely do. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I can’t say that I ever abided nerd stereotypes: I was never alone or felt outcast. ~ Patton Oswalt.
In my mind, I was always a comedian who was going to branch into writing. ~ Patton Oswalt.
When you put an album out, you can’t do any material from the album if people are paying to see you. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy. ~ Patton Oswalt.
George Bush is not stupid. He’s evil. OK? There’s a huge difference between stupid and evil. ~ Patton Oswalt.
People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald’s hash brown if it’s all they’ve got. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, video games, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I love the beginning of Magnolia, the thing about the dealer. That scene is genius. Brilliantly acted. ~ Patton Oswalt.
You just do as many shows as you can to hone what it is you’re working on. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
I never said that movies were struggling behind TV. I’m just saying that movies have a better creative cache. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I have to drink this much to be as unfunny as you. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Funny Patton Oswalt Quotes
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.
If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness. ~ Patton Oswalt.
If you play comedic scenes like they’re really serious, then it’s so much more funny than if you’re going for a laugh. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I’m not familiar with the metric system. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Knowing comedy is knowing human nature. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Imitation leads to exhilaration when you follow it back to its source. ~ Patton Oswalt.
As unhealthy as I am, I’m weirdly aware of exactly how my body functions. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
I’m always trying out new stuff onstage. That’s where I do all my writing. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I’ve hung out in the writer’s room a few times, but the fact is we’ve got such a good writing staff, I don’t want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Witty Patton Oswalt Quotes
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.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation made a bobble head of me and sent it to my management. No card, nothing. ~ Patton Oswalt.
It’s like our country is being run by a bunch of bad alcoholic dads right now. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
I fantasize and idealize myself as Bugs Bunny, but I know deep down I’m Daffy Duck. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
If someone like this were to like me, to like my comedy, and to like the way I conduct myself professionally, it would mean that I suck as a person. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I’ve had some pretty good arguments with people, but I’ve never regretted it. I’ve had people come up where it’s all emotion and no fact. That’s always sad. ~ Patton Oswalt.
If you actually do cold readings, it’s very close to how people actually talk, because you’re experiencing these thoughts anew every moment, and trying to make them come out coherently. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Hilarious Patton Oswalt Quotes
Even if it’s other people, like on MySpace pages, we’re just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we’re in. ~ Patton Oswalt.
All the truly great stand-ups say, I go onstage, and I work on jokes. The inspiration will happen while I’m doing my work. ~ Patton Oswalt. To me, in the end, the surest thing is work. ~ Patton Oswalt.
The man is clear in his mind. But his soul is mad. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
If Kevin James or Paul Giamatti drop weight, I’m done. I don’t want to be the last pudge out there. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I’m so beyond genre, drama, comedies, I just want to do really good, interesting projects. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Doing ‘Young Adult’ was really reassuring to me in a lot of ways. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about great actors. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I don’t want to get into extended conversations with people on MySpace, because there are friends I have extended conversations with every day. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Funniest Patton Oswalt Quotes
There’s nothing wrong with doing comedies, and I’m not against comedies, either, but I always want to do stuff that keeps me off my guard and gets me out of my comfort zone. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
I really had to imagine the kind of person that I would have been if I had never left my hometown. I don’t think I would have been a very pleasant person. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I’ve gotten very cynical and kind of anhedonic about all the things I have to do to get to do comedy: all the travel, hotels, and airports. ~ Patton Oswalt.
We need conservatives that can accept gays, and then we need hippies that can shave and bathe. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
I visited Surrey in the early fall of 1994, and I would return only if I was tasked to kill a demon to save the world. Maybe not even then. Sorry, Surrey. Sorry, world. Yay, hypothetical demon. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Zombies can’t believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
I’ve been very lucky in my life in terms of people who are able to tolerate me. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Humorous Patton Oswalt Quotes
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.
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.
You have to be ruthless with yourself, in terms of being honest about what is working and what is not. ~ Patton Oswalt.
The idea of, ‘The journey is the destination’ is put into action by browsing in an indie record store. Besides, a human being is a much better guide than a ‘More Like This’ link on the internet. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Meal isn’t over when I’m full. Meal’s over when I hate myself. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I like to write, I like to do stand-up, I like to act. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I think the kind of person that gravitates toward New York is a person that’s not so much focused on controlling exactly how they appear and how they exit. They’re more fascinated with the process. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
Here’s what I’m afraid of. I know a lot of comedians, friends of mine, who just got into the ‘Doesn’t matter what I say. It doesn’t matter. They’re just gonna laugh anyway.’ ~ Patton Oswalt.
One of my groupies gave me a film that they made, and it ended up being amazing, so I got it shown at South by Southwest. If I can help get their stuff out there, then great. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Popular Patton Oswalt Quotes
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.
Movies, to him and the majority of the planet, are an enhancement to a life. The way a glass of wine complements a dinner. I’m the other way around. I’m the kind of person who eats a few bites of food so that my stomach can handle the full bottle of wine I’m about to drink. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Any comedian who tells you how dark and dangerous they are, they’re not dark and dangerous. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I’m grateful that I had that uphill battle for 10 years of going onstage and having nobody know who I was, because you have to win them over. ~ Patton Oswalt.
To get asked to do stuff like ‘United States Of Tara’ and ‘Caprica’ is terrific. I can’t complain. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out if me with steel pipes. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
If I were to just focus on stand-up, I could actually, paradoxically enough, be home way more, because I would leave on a Friday, go do a couple theaters Friday, Saturday, maybe Sunday, come home. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their twenties? ~ Patton Oswalt.
Yeah, there were a few years in the early nineties where I really began to hate what was valued as funny and just sort of what was valued in stand-up, period. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Top Patton Oswalt Quotes
With acting, you see some of the kids are literally just off the street, untrained, and they are great. And others are off the street, untrained, and kind of horrible. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
It’s the method of consumption, not what’s on the plate. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I have some shorter stories coming out in other books early next year. I might be pitching a revamp of Ghost Rider in the spring. We’ll see. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Any acting job that I ever got, I always treated it like I was a neophyte, I didn’t know what I was doing and I was going to work just as hard as I do on my stand-up. ~ Patton Oswalt.
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.
Famous Patton Oswalt Quotes
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.
Even if you’re popular, there are times when you just feel like you’re not a part of things. ~ Patton Oswalt.
The process is to me is going onstage night after night after night after night until I get a new hour. And then once that hour is solidified and recorded, I move on. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact. That infrastructure might be on fire, yes. ~ Patton Oswalt.
But for the most part, for the majority of a stand-up audience, you better have new stuff they’ve not heard. And if you put an album out, just consider that material gone. At least that’s how I see it. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Part of being in your twenties is not knowing an ally when you see one. ~ Patton Oswalt.
If you hit a midget on the head with a stick, he turns into 40 gold coins. ~ Patton Oswalt.
Knock on wood, my groupies tend to be very artistic, creative people – sometimes way more creative than I am. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians. ~ Patton Oswalt.
I grew up in such a featureless, personality-less suburb. There was nothing to push against. ~ Patton Oswalt.
So these were 93 top Patton Oswalt quotes, jokes, one liners and sayings.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Dane Cook quotes and Bob Hope quotes.
