I can’t recommend this book enough if you’re at all interested in stand up comedy. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. Since part of this book is in interview format, I put in bold the person being quoted above their quotes.

Franklyn Ajaye Quotes:

“You must study their deliveries, their use of their bodies, their timing, and their use of audio and vocal effects.” (3)

“An aspiring comedian must be determined to get to his or her true feelings on a subject and convey that to the audience. Figure out what you’re feeling or interested in because the goal is to get the audience interested in what you’re interested in. Good stand up comedy is drawing people into your head.” (11)

“Originality is never embraced as quickly as the commonplace.” (12)

“Don’t try to give a funny opinion; give your opinion in a way that will be funny.” (12)

“When you take a pause before delivering your punch line, you will be using silence as a creative entity in itself.” (14)

“You must not be afraid of small bits of silence. To use it well is the height of confidence and skill for a comedian. It increases the tension in a good way and adds contrast like a curveball complements the fastball of a good pitcher.” (14)

“You can’t wait forever for an audience to get the joke, but you should give them at least two seconds to join in before you go on to the next one.” (15)

“Walking back and forth also helps by creating the illusion that you are thinking of the routines on the spot, giving your performance a more spontaneous feeling.” (15)

“Ideally, you want to be in a fifty-fifty power-sharing arrangement with the audience – both of you are there for a mutually enjoyable experience.” (17)

“Obviously the audience has veto power signified by whether they laugh or not, but you-not them-retain the ultimate power to decide what they’re going to get the opportunity to laugh at.” (18)

“A technique I developed quite naturally to help me make smooth transitions was to use a word or phrase from the next routine in the preceding one.” (18)

“Being a professional comedian is doing it right and good, when you don’t feel like it.” (37)

“Note the “quality” – not just the quantity – of the laugh that you’re getting. This is just as important – if not more – than just getting laughs. Cheap laughs are just that. Your jokes’ll be treated just like Chinese food. In an hour, people’ll be hungry for another comedian.” (38)

“In addition to listening to the audience’s laugh, you want to listen to their silence. Is it bored or interested silence? The silence is quieter and filled with energy when they’re interested. You can hear a pin drop. When they’re bored, you can always hear it.” (38)

“Bombing teaches you how badly you want to become a comedian. Because unless it’s a burning desire, you’ll quit when the consistent bombing becomes too much to take.” (40)

“Evaluate every performance on: stage presence, concentration, delivery, material and lessons learned.” (41)

“I wasn’t able to showcase myself to my satisfaction on television until I did one very important thing: I started treating television as though it were just another night at a club. I stopped ruminating continuously over my television set and thinking about its potential significance. This started with my last few shots with Johnny Carson when I realized why my spots hadn’t seemed as funny to me as my club sets. I realized that the extra thought and preparation actually worked against me. Once I adopted this new attitude, I started doing television spots that I was happy with. But let me stress that this was just my approach.” (44)

“I advise treating the studio audience like a nightclub audience because that’s the reason you’re doing television – to get them to come see you in a nightclub.” (45)

“If you do stories, or material with a lot of tags, or afterthought lines, you’ll probably have to cut those out. In other words, you’ll have to strip-mine your material and “lean” it up for time constraints.” (45)

“Be prepared to cut your little extra lines that come after a big punchline and move on to the next joke or routine to give your set more punch and crispness. You can keep them in your set, but if the audience applauds your big line, don’t do your tag when it dies down, just move on.” (45)

“Doing panel well is actually more important than doing a good stand-up spot because it’s when the audience observes you in a more “conversational” mode and decides if they like your personality – which is one of the real keys to popularity.” (46)

“It’s better to play to the host as though in a real conversation and let the audience listen in- which they are.” (47)

Louie Anderson quotes:

“Whatever kind of person you are, that’s the kind of comedy that comes out.” (54)

“One services the gift of creativity by always taking a bigger chance. No matter if you fail or not.” (55)

“The secret behind timing is to hold whatever you’re going ot say until you absolutely have to say it.” (57)

“On television you can wait a little longer and you won’t lose ‘em. If you rush it, you’ll fuck it up.” (57)

“I like to believe that the audience is smart, and I refuse to hit people over the head with my lines.” (57)

“I found out that a lot of movement was better than a lot of words. A lot of expressions would get me a lot more mileage than any word, ‘cause if I just give the expression, then you have to make up the word and your word will be stronger than mine ever could be.” (58)

Richard Beltzer quotes:

Creativity’s a blessing and a curse. If you don’t tend to it, it can do other things to you. That’s why we feel so good when we’re being creative – because we’re doing the right thing.” (65)

Elayne Boosler quotes:

“Whatever city I’m in, I read their paper because I think it’s just great if you can go up and bounce off ten or twenty minutes of local news because you’re an outsider coming in and looking at them.” (73)

“I had a friend once tell me, if you can’t write anything on a particular day, take three extraneous word out of an existing joke, and that’ll be your day’s work.” (75)

“No personal checks, no cashier’s checks, only certified checks, only bank checks always paid before the last performance. Never performing with any monies outstanding. Round-trip tickets so you’re not left, mandatory deposit at least thirty days ahead, guarantee that they’ll spend “x” amount of dollars on advertising for my appearance. You get no comps, the tickets belong to me – if you want to have guests, you pay me for them. Your club, my tickets. It’s hardball and it’s ugly and it’s horrible every time. It never gets better.” (75)

George Carlin quotes:

“You have to start with where your true attitudes and beliefs start.” (84)

“When I read or think of something, I don’t immediately think it’s funny, but I become aware that it has a potential for what I call “comic distortion.” (85)

“The artist and the scientist parts of the brain have to work together. One side is point out to you all these ironies, and the other side has to sort them out and organize them into patterns.” (86)

“You have to find the patterns of your thinking. Like I have thoughts about social concerns, thoughts about little funny wordplay things thoughts about values that I feel are important in life, and once a month I go through them and read them, and sort them into piles based on their patterns or topics. I find that when I do this sorting out, it helps me see the possibilities for connections. I can see something that relates to something that I might’ve done the week before.” (86)

“If it’s important enough for you to think of, and important enough for you to drive someplace, stand up, and tell people to be quiet so you can tell them about it, that’s gotta be in your voice and your delivery.” (87)

Ellen Degeneres Quotes:

“The audience came to see you, and you don’t let them dictate the pace of the show. You set the pace and then they can go along with it. Sometimes you have drunk people who want to yell out when you have those pauses, and that’s really aggravating, but the more you stick to it, the people who enjoy that will keep coming back to see you. So you crate your own audience and eliminate those with short attention spans.” (95)

“You have to look at everything as though it’s getting you ready. And you’re getting closer and closer each time.” (101)

Richard Jeni quotes:

“I don’t know if it’s so much instinctive as it was a result of noticing how much the audience likes it when you physicalize it, because really what you’re doing when you do comedy is you’re trying to paint a picture in somebody’s mind. And the more vivid the picture is, the better chance you have of getting them to laugh at your idea. It’s like the difference between a book and a movie.” (104)

“When you’re trying to be experimental at the beginning, it’s almost the worst time to do that because the audiences you have are terrible. They’re small, drunk, hostile, and they have no respect for the show because it’s usually someplace that doesn’t inspire respect.” (106)

“I feel if you establish that you don’t have to go low, then you can go low for a couple of minutes just as a fun thing.” (109)

“”One of the most productive times to write, if you can keep from chasing the local women, is after the show. Because everything is charged in that direction. All those comedy switches are on.” (111)

“I didn’t start out as a guy doing a lot of voices and sounds. The thing that is really interesting: I couldn’t do a lot of these things when I first started out, and one of the reasons I couldn’t do them was because I didn’t believe that I could do them. But as time went on, I started to be able to do them, and as I started to get more confident that I could, I started to try more, and started to succeed – to where I end up today where you’re asking me how I do all these voices and sounds.” (113)

“I always felt that whatever success I’ve had as a comedian is because I don’t do any one thing great. But I do a lot of things pretty good, and it adds up to a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.” (113)

“I don’t talk about politics that much because the stuff that people laugh at the most are things they relate to on an emotional level.” (114)

Jay Leno Quotes:

“The one thing I learned very quickly was that your material will ascend or descend to the level of the room that you are playing.” (120)

“I’ve always told comedians that if you can do this for seven years, I mean physically make it to the stage for seven years, you’ll always make a living. If you’ve been in the business longer than seven years and you’re not successful, there’s probably another reason.” (125)

“When I got on stage, that was the first time that I did something where I did and thought about it at the same time. That was the only time that I was ever focused, and it’s still true today.” (126)

“”If you asked me if I’d rather be a comedian or The Tonight Show host, I’d be out of here tomorrow if I had to make a choice.” (126)

“If you try to change their mind, you’re no longer a comedian, then you’re a humorist, then you’re a satirist, then you’re out of show business.” (127)

“The good comedians always put the jokes above anything else. To me, the ideal joke is when you’ve got your stupid redneck over here and your college professor over here, and they both laugh at the same joke for different reasons. The professor is laughing because it’s clever and sees that you might mean something else, and the redneck is laughing at the obvious.” (128)

Richard Lewis Quotes:

“David Brenner told me that if you do a joke in front of 20,000 people and you just hear a titter, get it out of the act.” (142)

“I decided to charge a higher cover price and see if Richard Lewis fans will actually come to the nightclubs to get the room mainly filled with people who would come to see me in a concert hall. And it worked… I wanted to know if my material would work with my fans, not just with anybody who would come to any nightclub.” (144-145)

Bill Maher Quotes:

“As a comedian, you want to be in touch with as much as you can with everyday life, and the more successful you get, the more you become removed.” (160)

Paul Reiser Quotes:

“When you’re performing, your adrenaline will probably kick in and make you want to go faster, so slow down, and if you think you’re going too slow, slow down even more. Because your gauge is off. What you think is happening isn’t really happening because you’re so charged.” (167)

“Watching a mediocre comic will trigger you. You’re not inspired by greatness, you’re inspired by mediocrity.” (168)

“Getting on The Tonight Show is the easiest job in the world because all they look for is good comics. If you’re a good comic, there is no challenge, you’ll be on. The hard thing is getting good enough to be there.” (169)

“Cosby said that very often the most personal will turn out to be the most universal.” (170)

“How do I adapt to different arenas? One piece of advice given to me early on was just to put the room where you are most comfortable in your head. Like I know how to do the Catch a Rising Star club at two in the morning, but I don’t know how to do this theater, so when I’m at the theater I pretend it’s two in the morning at Catch a Rising Star. I know where I feel comfortable, and I know I feel funnier around certain people than others. So I get into the mindset, “Okay, where do I feel comfortable? I feel funny with these people in this situation and these circumstances.” So put yourself there and that will bring you out in your best light.” (173)

Chris Rock Quotes:

“Just be a big sponge and listen to people who you want to ignore. Really listen to them, because they’re going to say some little thing you can use. They can’t help it.” (177)

“Even though I know the jokes, I’m still looking for that ad-lib. I’m wondering, is it there, is it here?” (178)

“There’s definitely a jump from clubs to doing concerts. A concert is like a movie, like a play. It really should all tie together. It really should be a show, not just a collection of jokes.” (179)

“I felt that even if you don’t think it’s funny, I don’t want you to think it’s boring.” (182)

“I’d see guys getting mad ‘cause their career wasn’t moving, and I’d say, “Well write some new jokes.” Every new batch of jokes took me where it was gonna take me. When I stopped writing, the career stayed right there.” (182)

“I was aware I’d taken my career to another level when I got to the point where I wasn’t really competing with other comedians.” (183)

Roseanne Quotes:

“Everything has a message whether you think it does or doesn’t.” (192)

Jerry Seinfeld Quotes:

“I say, “I’m going to sit for an hour.” I always consider sitting the accomplishment.” (197)

“If people can get a quick sense of who you are, they relax. The worst I did was bomb every other show – which was tolerable.” (198)

“Bill Cosby once told me, “When you’re the pilot of the plane, you can’t come on the P.A. system and go, ‘Well, I’m gonna try and take her up.’”” (201)

Garry Shandling Quotes:

“You have to not give a shit in the best possible sense.” (211)

“You really have to be willing to bomb, and to fail, before you can be really good. If you’re afraid to fail, you’ll be bad. If you see an artist who’s really afraid to fail, it’s not someone you’re going to like, and it’s not someone who is doing real art. What they’re really doing is looking for approval.” (211)

“I remember Steve Garvey saying, “You’ve got 162 games, so you can’t ride an emotional roller coaster during a season.” So I applied that to stand up whenever I’d have a bad show.” (212)

“People don’t understand that you can’t do old material because it reflects something that you aren’t anymore. You might as well be another comedian. If you can do your old material and make it work, you’ve got a bigger problem. That means you’re stuck.” (212)

“Acceptance is a springboard to go deeper, because once the audience accepts that you’re funny, you no longer have to prove that. You’re now freer to explore.” (215)

Sinbad Quotes:

“The game I play with myself is, make it grow. Nobody else in the room has to know this. My game is to keep the waitresses looking and listening to me every night – because the waitresses that work at comedy clubs are your judge of comedy. My goal is, if you saw me twice, you got something different the next time.” (219)

“You can’t be scared to get rid of stuff, and you can’t limit yourself.” (220)

“Comics were made to be gypsies. We weren’t made to be contained. We’re not supposed to be able to come to a board meeting.” (220)

George Wallace Quotes:

“When I walk on stage, it’s basically me you’re buying. You’re not buying any particular joke, or anything like that. You’re buying George Wallace. My point of view is that I’m relaying a message that you would like to extend to yourself.” (232)

“My job is to have the antennas out. I’ve been on The Tonight Show for twenty years, but you can’t continue to do The Tonight Show for twenty years and not have the antennas out because you got to keep them with new stuff. That’s the difference in the comedians who do a lot of TV and those who don’t – new jokes.” (233)

“You have to be better doing panel than stand-up because that’s your personal moment. You’re delivering jokes in a different manner.” (234)

“Put your personality out first, ask the audience how they’re doing. ‘Cause there’s no reason for you to buy Coke over Pepsi; you’ve gotta like the salesperson who’s selling it.” (237)

“Enough people know me, and I know that I’m sharp enough after twenty years to know that now it’s my show and my stage no matter what happened before me. It might take me three minutes, but I’ll change the mood of the room.” (240)

Jonathan Winters Quotes:

“You gotta take more chances. You gotta be a gambler in your material. You’re gonna get your hands spanked every now and then, but you’re also gonna get some, “Hey, I loved what the guy said. I wonder if he said it off the top of his head.” (248)

Budd Friedman Quotes:

“More and more people are waiting now [turning down a network opportunity] because they know if they get a shot and it doesn’t work, they might get another one. Which is smart. I think you have to fight for what you know is right.” (264)

Irwin Arthur Quotes:

“He or she goes out and finds talent that they believe that they can find work for.  Sometimes you find people at the embryonic stage of their career, and you hope that you can grow with them as they develop.” (273)

“One of my secretaries in New York was a little blond lady named Joan Rivers, who I never believed would make it, but she had this perseverance that went beyond the limit.” (273)

“It certainly helps to represent people who are well known. People are calling you for them, and then we use that as a wedge to get the unknown person a job.” (273)

“You look for a likability, a stage presence, and you look for some kind of an intelligence in that there’s a beginning, middle, and end, or a potential for a beginning, middle, and end to apiece of material that a person is doing. You look for natural funniness.” (273)

“Always be compelled to do the best you can on any given night. That’s part of the discipline. Don’t ever throw a performing opportunity away. I can’t emphasize that enough.” (274)

“In the beginning, you’re looking for someone who has a stage presence to attract attention from the audience, and compel it to watch them. I firmly believe that it’s the persona first, and then the material.” (274)

“The first thing to remember is that the agent is looking for you. If you have talent, we want you as bad as you want us.” (275)

Buddy Morra Quotes:

“Someone once said to me that most performers spend most of their time waiting for the opportunity, instead of preparing for it. If you prepare for the opportunity, and you have the ability, the opportunity will come.” (282)

“Material is almost incidental. Someone once said years ago, “when the audience walks out, do they remember the joke, or do they remember the person?” If they remember the joke, you’re in trouble.” (283)

As always, if you liked the quotes, click here to buy the full book.

“The idea is the most important. The structure is second. Ironically, the script itself is least important. Of course it takes the most time. But a story and a script can be “fixed.” An idea can’t.” (20)

“Always pick stories that scream for visualization.” (22)

“Greek theater, Shakespeare, and actually everything of quality known to Western persons has a significant undertow of sex or violence or a combination of thereof. To deny it is insane and even worse, wrong.” (23)

“This does not mean blood and gore and naked bodies. Sometimes the most extreme form of violence is psychological violence.” (23)

“One screenwriter friend periodically comes out of his Bel Air cave and rides city buses without any geographic destination. His creative destination is to overhear “real people” talk for dialogue, stories, and scenes.” (28)

“If you get something in your writing teeth you have got to do, do it. Forget about the marketplace. Follow your obsession. Obsession makes the best screenplay character drive for screenplays, and obsession makes the best screenwriter drive for you.” (30)

“Forget writing for money, which means trying to second guess what the marketplace wants. By the time you write the screenplay, the marketplace will generally have gone on to another fad.” (35)

“I suddenly realized that I, by then, knew more overall than most people who had been catapulted into that tragedy of American history. It was time to stop researching and start writing. Too much research can be the disguise of procrastination or fear.” (35)

“Individualism is what makes screenplays great, not their uniqueness.” (40)

“Even if this “love story in a madhouse” or any of your scripts you write “on speculation” never sell, you must love the process. That should be more important to you than acceptance or sale. Make your principal reward the very act of writing. That will keep you psychologically afloat and able to handle those difficult and numerous rejections. (41)

“Forget making a living, being famous, or getting rich. If you’re targeted on any of these goals, you’ll fail yourself, your society, and your world.” (42)

“You have to make the audience care about your on-screen people and their dilemmas, and when that occurs you’ve created believable unbelievability. Audiences will just not get with a film that starts with what they perceive as unbelievable unbelievability.” (49)

“Beware of such “friends.” Yes, you need feedback because the isolation can be debilitating. Just make very sure it’s good feedback from an intelligent, feeling fellow human.” (55)

“Extremes are the best choice we all have.” (60)

“You want to establish your heavy is a monster. For instance, a character is about to rob a bank. Have him, just before opening the bank door, shoot an old lady’s dog. The audience will hate him. Ironically, probably much more so than if he had shot the old lady.” (75)

“The best flaw is obsession. Your hero should want something so badly, he or she will battle any equally obsessed heavy to get it against all odds. That is the supreme conflict.” (76)

“Every classic human heavy has one of two motivations. Greed or power. Period. Don’t look for more than greed or power. That’s it. Villainy emanates from those two motives.” (77)

“When you’re in a corner, always look to your characters to lead you out. They will show the way.” (81)

“People who can really matter in getting your script made may feel that your numbered characters are superficial, and hence that could carry over to the star roles.” (85)

“At all steps along the story way, make sure the scene you’re in was caused by the scene that went before. And the following scene you’re in was caused by the scene that went before. And the following scene is there because of the one you’re in. Keep that rhythm going and you’ll have a damned good story.” (89)

“Anticipation is often as wonderful, or as suspenseful, as the realization of the end result.” (97)

“John T. Kelley wrote: “No matter how little you feel like working, force your mind to continue thinking about the story or idea under consideration. Eventually the wheels will begin to turn. Usually it won’t take more than five or ten minutes at the most.” Jack London said: “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”” (98)

“Pick and start with the most passionate, exciting, funny, or tension-filled scene you can find.” (99)

“The audience’s “need to know” should always be in your story mind, but especially in Act One. Withhold as long as you can.” (100)

“Don’t ever rely on the last half of your script being brilliant. Few will get to that section if the first five and ten pages don’t happen and happen strong.” (132)

“Joseph Heller wrote Catch 22 from four to seven each morning, before taking the train into New York for his 9-5 advertising job.” (137)

“Life is when thing happen one after another. Structure is when things happen because of the other.” (162)

“The scenes in question have the couple waiting to learn about their son’s condition, and then being informed he has died. These are two potentially boring, obligatory scenes. I heightened the drama and the interest level by using the third party trick. You see, generally when someone else is in front of your two people, they can’t be so on-the-nose with their dialogue. Restrained subtext is what the scene’s dialogue must contain.” (172)

“A viewer cannot set a movie down. He can set a book down. He can stop, take a break, pick it up later. But when a viewer is bored for more than three or four minutes, the movie is irreparably harmed. The flow is broken.” (180)

“I am generally far more interested in being effective than right, and being effective means selling. During my thirty years of selling scripts I have been inculcated with a David Susskind admonishment about what “they” want: “Happy people with happy problems and happy endings.”” (268)

“Most of Hollywood hates unhappy endings. I recommend the happy, even ecstatic ending to make your script saleable. Later in the process, you can suggest considering the unhappy ending. The purchasing party will probably turn you down but you’ll be pleased you tried.” (268)

“We writers can always write. We may not be getting paid, but we can always work. Not so for anyone else in this collaborative art called filmmaking.” (318)

“Consider Dr. Samuel Johnson’s words to a fellow writer: “Your manuscript is both good and original. The part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.”” (319)

“Remember, audiences remember characters even more than story. Salt the mine. Make your characters memorable. Here and now.” (325)

“Sooner or later you may have to accept the fact that your ability does not best reside in comedy or drama or action adventure or whatever. It’s all right to lack strong aptitude for certain story forms, but deluding yourself is not alright. Identifying your strengths and weaknesses in writing is as important a self-recognition as you can have as a beginning or established writer.” (329)

“Don’t be an “anything you like I like” writer because you will be as undesirable to those persons able to buy your wares as a writer who won’t listen at all.” (335)

“Many writers who have been working a long time have huge attitudes, yet blame their lack of employment on ageism. Often that’s real, but as often their attitude in meetings is simply insufferable. They’re almost always dealing with people younger and less experienced than themselves. They find it hard not to come off as “the teacher.” Quinn Martin said: “We’re not doing Shakespeare. It’s a game. Play it, enjoy it. If the day comes when you can’t, get out.”” (335)

“If you must say “no,” make sure you’re not destroying your future relationship with that person. You’d rather be effective, and not be replaced by another writer, than be right. In this business of show, you can be “right” but wrong in the long of the haul. Do not be “wrong by being right.”” (336)

“We do not need to like Citizen Kane, most of the Humphrey Bogart characters, or the pedophile Howie in Fallen Angel. We need to understand them. To understand them means to dimensionalize them. To develop the character beyond the stereotype. To make Butch and Sundance more than robbers. To make E.T. Not a monster from outer space, but lovable and loving.” (338)

“Don’t worry about making the character lovable. Worry about the role’s having dimension so that “they” and the audience understand why the character is what the character is. Put in “pet the dog” scenes.” (338)

“UCLA’s John Wooden constantly tried to psychologically condition his team to have as close to the same demeanor when they lost as when they won. He believed if the lows were too low and the highs too high, the slams at each end would be destructive to the team’s season-long morale.” (341)

“Many professors, professionals, and others in the midst of life seem to be locked in the mode of not believing a majority of people have talent.” (344)

As always, if you find these quotes useful, please buy the full book here.

“If there is any sure route to success and fulfillment in life, it is to be found in the long-term, essentially goalless process of mastery.” (xiii)

“You have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to e getting nowhere.” (15)

“When your tennis partner starts improving his or her game and you don’t, the game eventually breaks up. The same thing applies to relationships.” (24)

“Unlike the Hacker, we were working hard, doing the best we could to improve our skills. But we had learned the perils of getting ahead of ourselves, and now were willing ot stay on the plateau for as long as was necessary. Ambition still was there, but it was tame.d Once again we enjoyed our training. We loved the plateau. And we made progress.” (44)

““A lot of people go for things only because a teacher told them they should, or their parents,” said Olympic gymnast Peter Vidmar. “People who get into something for the money, the fame, or the medal can’t be effective. When you discover your own desire, you’re not going to wait for other people to find solutions to your problems. You’re going to find your own. I set goals for myself, but underlying all the goals and the work wast he fact that I enjoyed it.”” (45)

“Recognition is often unsatisfying and fame is like seawater for the thirsty. Love of your work, willingness to stay with it even in the absence of extrinsic reward, is good food and good drink.” (47)

“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is not a man of small ego. I’m sure he loved the money, the fame, the privileges his career brought him. But he loved the sky-hook more.” (48)

“The human individual is equipped to learn and go on learning prodigiously from birth to death, and this is precisely what sets him or her apart from all other known forms of life. Man has at various times been defined as a building animal, a working animal, and a fighting animal, but all of these definitions are incomplete and finally false. Man is a learning animal.” (53)

“If you intend to take the journey of mastery, the best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction.” (55)

“Even those who will some day overthrow conventional ways of thinking or doing need to know what it is they are overthrowing.” (55)

“It’s particularly challenging, in fact, for a top performer to become a first-rate teacher. Instruction demands a certain humility; at best, the teacher takes delight in being surpassed by his or her students.” (57)

“The essence of the instructor’s art lies in the ability to work effectively and enthusiastically with beginners and to serve as a guide on the path of mastery for those who are neither as fast nor as talented as the norm.” (58)

“In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen master Shunryu Suzuki approaches the question of fast and slow learners in terms of horses. “In our scriptures, it is said that there are four kinds of horses: excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver’s will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn to run.
“When we hear this story, almost all of us want to be the best horse. If it is impossible to be the best one, we want to be the second best.” But this is a mistake, Master Suzuki says. When you learn too easily, you’re tempted not to work hard, not to penetrate to the marrow of a practice.
“If you study calligraphy, you will find that those who are not so clever usually become the best calligraphers. Those who are very clever with their hands often encounter great difficulty after they have reached a certain stage. This is also true in art, and in life.” The best horse, according to Suzuki, may be the worst horse. And the worse horse can be the best, for if it perseveres, it will have learned whatever it is practicing all the way to the marrow of its bones.” (67)

“Learning eventually involves interaction between the learner and the learning environment, and its effectiveness relates tot he frequency, quality, variety, and intensity of the interaction.” (68)

“If the traveler is fortunate – that is, if the path is complex and profound enough – the destination is two miles farther way for every mile he or she travels.” (74)

“There’s another secret: The people we know as masters don’t devote themselves to their particular skill just to get better at it. The truth is, they love to practice – and because of this they do get better. And then, to complete the circle, the better they get the more they enjoy performing the basic moves over and over again.” (75)

““The master,” an old martial arts saying goes, “is the one who stays on the mat five minutes longer every day than anybody else.”” (76)

“The master of any game is generally a master of practice.” (77)

““How long will it take me to master aikido?” a prospective student asks. “How Long do you expect to live?” is the only respectable response.” (79)

“The courage of a master is measured by his or her willingness to surrender. This means surrendering to your teacher and to the demands of your discipline. It also means surrendering your own hard-won proficiency from time to time in order to reach a higher or different level of proficiency.” (81)

“The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty: Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.” (83)

“For the master, surrender means there are no experts. There are only learners.” (88)

“Now we come, as come we must in anything of real consequence, to a seeming contradiction, a paradox. Almost without exception, those we know as masters are dedicated to the fundamentals of their calling. They are zealots of practice, connoisseurs of the small, incremental step. At the same time – and here’s the paradox – these people, these masters, are precisely the one who are likely to challenge previous limits, to take risks for the sake of higher performance, and even to become obsessive at times in that pursuit. Clearly, for them the key is not either/or, it’s both/and.” (97)

“The trick here is not only to test the edges of the envelope, but also to walk the fine line between endless, goalless practice and those alluring goals that appear along the way.” (98)

In the words of the ancient Eastern adage: “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”” (99)

“The new black belt is expected to be on the mat the next day, ready to take the first fall.” (99)

“But before you can even consider playing this edge, there must be many years of instruction, practice, surrender, and intentionality. And afterwards? More training, more time on the plateau: the never-ending path again.” (101)

“Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed – and it’s a very good thing they do.” (107)

“If an organization or cultural reform meets tremendous resistance, it is because it’s either a tremendously bad idea or a tremendously good idea. Trivial change, bureaucratic meddling, is much easier to accept, and that’s one reason why you see so much of it.” (112)

“The fine art of playing the edge in this case involves a willingness to take one step back for every two forward, sometimes vice versa. It also demands a determination to keep pushing, but not without awareness. Simply turning off your awareness to the warnings deprives you of guidance and risks damaging the system. Simply pushing your way through despite the warning signals increases the possibility of backsliding.” (115)

Tools for mastery:

1. Be aware of the way homeostasis works.
2. Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change.
3. Develop a support system.
4. Follow a regular practice.
5. Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. (114-118)

“A human being is the kind of machine that wears out from lack of use. There are limits, of course, and we do need healthful rest and relaxation, but for the most part we gain energy by using energy. Often the best remedy for physical weariness is thirty minutes of aerobic exercise.” (120)

Getting energy for mastery:

1. Maintain physical fitness
2. Acknowledge the negative and accentuate the positive.
3. Try telling the truth.
4. Honor but don’t indulge your own dark side.
5. Set your priorities
6. Make Commitments
7. Get on the path of mastery and stay on it. (123-131)

“Priorities do shift, and you can change them at any time, but simply getting them down in black and white adds clarity to your life, and clarity creates energy.” (129)

“The gift of an externally imposed deadline isn’t always available. Sometimes you need to set your own. But you have to take it seriously. One way to do this is to make it public.” (130)

“You can’t build energy up by not using it. Adequate rest is, of course, a part of the master’s journey, but, unaccompanied by positive action, rest may only depress you.” (131)

““Never marry a person,” psychologist Nathaniel Brandon tells his clients, “who is not a friend of your excitement.”” (134)

Pitfalls along the path to mastery:

1. Conflicting way of life
2. Obsessive goal orientation
3. Poor instruction
4. Lack of competitiveness
5. Over-competitiveness
6. Laziness
7. Injuries
8. Drugs
9. Prizes and medals
10. Vanity
11. Dead seriousness
12. Inconsistency
13. Perfectionism (133-140)

“It’s fine to have ambitious goals, but the best way of reaching them is to cultivate modest expectations at every step along the way. When you’re climbing a mountain, in other words, be aware that the peak is ahead, but don’t keep looking up at it. Keep your eyes on the path. And when you reach the top of the mountain, as the Zen saying goes, keep on climbing.” (134)

“If you’re always thinking about appearances, you can never attain the state of concentration that’s necessary for effective learning and top performance.” (138)

“To be deadly serious is to suffer tunnel vision. When choosing fellow voyagers, beware of grimness, self importance, and the solemn eye.” (139)

“Even without comparing ourselves to the world’s greatest, we set such high standards for ourselves that neither we nor anyone else could ever meet them-and nothing is more destructive to creativity than this. We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.” (140)

“Psychologist Abraham Maslow discovered a childlike quality (he called it a “second naivete”) in people who have met an unusually high degree of their potential.” (175)

If you liked the book, please buy it here.

“When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable.” (Kindle Location 13).

“In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.” (Kindle Location 32).

“My whole life, people who ask about my scar within one week of knowing me have invariably turned out to be egomaniacs of average intelligence or less. And egomaniacs of average intelligence or less often end up in the field of TV journalism.” (Kindle Locations 64-66).

“So I spent four years attempting to charm the uninterested. (It was probably good practice for my future career on a low-rated TV show.)” (Kindle Location 521).

“A wise friend once told me, “Don’t wear what fashion designers tell you to wear. Wear what they wear.”” (Kindle Location 1080).

“It seemed promising because I’d heard the show was looking to diversify. Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.” (Kindle Locations 1154-1155).

“The only advice anyone had given me about meeting with Lorne was “Whatever you do, don’t finish his sentences.”” (Kindle Location 1163).

“Things I Learned from Lorne Michaels

1) Producing is about discouraging creativity.

…sometimes Actors have what they call “ideas.” Usually it involves them talking more, or, in the case of more experienced actors, sitting more. When Actors have ideas it’s very important to get to the core reason behind their idea. Is there something you’re asking them to do that’s making them uncomfortable? Are they being asked to bare their midriff or make out with a Dick Cheney look-alike? (For the record, I have asked actors to do both, and they were completely game.) Rather than say, “I’m uncomfortable breast-feeding a grown man who I just met today,” the actor may speak in code and say something like “I don’t think my character would do that.” Or “I’ve hurt my back and I’m not coming out of my dressing room.” You have to remember that actors are human beings. Which is hard sometimes because they look so much better than human beings. Is there someone in the room the actor is trying to impress? This is a big one and should not be overlooked. If a male actor is giving you a hard time about something, you must immediately scan the area for pretty interns…

2) The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.

…You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.

What I learned about bombing as a writer at Saturday Night is that you can’t be too worried about your “permanent record.” Yes, you’re going to write some sketches that you love and are proud of forever—your golden nuggets. But you’re also going to write some real shit nuggets. And unfortunately, sometimes the shit nuggets will make it onto the air. You can’t worry about it. As long as you know the difference, you can go back to panning for gold on Monday.

3) When hiring, mix Harvard Nerds with Chicago Improvisers and stir.

Harvard Is Classical Military Theory, Improv Is Vietnam.

4) Television is a visual medium.

You may want to be diligent and stay up with the writers all night, but if you’re going to be on the show, you can’t.

5) Don’t make any big decisions right after the season ends.

The interesting thing about this piece of advice is that no one ever takes it.

6) Never cut to a closed door.

7) Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning.

#8 Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy.

Lorne knows that the most exhausting people occasionally turn out the best stuff. How do I explain the presence of crazy people on the staff if we’re following Rule #7? Easily: These crazy people are charming and brilliant and great fun to see at three in the morning. Also, some people arrive at the show sane and the show turns them crazy.” (Kindle Locations 1180-1264).

“Real movie stars do look different from regular people. They are often a little smaller and usually have nicer teeth, shoes, and watches than anyone else in the room.” (Kindle Locations 1291-1292).

“Writers are often assigned to help produce sketches that the performers write.” (Kindle Locations 1297-1298).

“Saturday Night Live runs on a combustion engine of ambition and disappointment.” (Kindle Location 1315).

“If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.” (Kindle Location 1407).

“Technology doesn’t move backward. No society has ever de-industrialized.” (Kindle Locations 1560-1561).

“What I learned about Film Acting is that it’s mostly about not standing in other people’s light, and remembering what hand you had your papers in. When you do your “off-camera” lines for someone, you try to put your head real close to the camera. That’s about it. You’re a trained film actor now.” (Kindle Locations 1811-1813).

“Though we are grateful for the affection 30 Rock has received from critics and hipsters, we were actually trying to make a hit show. We weren’t trying to make a low-rated critical darling that snarled in the face of conventionality. We were trying to make Home Improvement and we did it wrong.” (Kindle Locations 1837-1839).

“Even if I sucked, it might be a good rating. A good rating is a good rating, even if people tune in just to be mad about how much it sucked.” (Kindle Locations 1971-1972).

“By the second week, I realized what made this experience so fun and different. For the first time ever, I was performing in front of an audience that wanted to see me. I had spent so many years handing out fliers, begging people to check out my improv team. I was so used to trying to win the audience over or just get permission to be there that a willing audience was an incredible luxury. It was like having a weight lifted off you. I thought, “This must be what it’s like for Darrell when he plays Bill Clinton.” Or for Tracy Morgan when he does anything. People are just happy to see them.” (Kindle Locations 2067-2071).

“Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.” (Kindle Locations 2079-2081).

“Some weeks you got to produce a pure little comedy piece that was dear to your heart and had a great host like Alec Baldwin or Julia Louis-Dreyfus in it. Some weeks you had to sit and take notes from the smallest Hanson brother about what jokes he didn’t care for.” (Kindle Locations 2152-2153).

“When people say, “You really, really must ” do something, it means you don’t really have to. No one ever says, “You really, really must deliver the baby during labor.” When it’s true, it doesn’t need to be said.” (Kindle Locations 2298-2299).

If you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

“I felt timing inside me, knew instinctively the exact moment to pause, the instant to hit a line like punching a button to detonate laughter – and it was laughter with me, not at me, laughter intoxicating beyond anything. I had never knowing how to deal with adults, ahd always felt there was nothing inside my head which could be of any interest to them, but those men wanted this pathetic, fantasy-ridden kid at the table, wanted me to perform and be funny, wanted to be entertained and I was doing it. I had found out how to get my way, how to get them to say, “Sure, you can stay up another twenty minutes.” By making them laugh I was in charge. It was the first time I ever had the heady feeling, the first time I found this way to be in control – and I have lived by that knowledge to this day.” (54)

“A comic onstage must be in command, an authoritarian figure. Ladylike ways do not work for my audiences. I have to be the toughest one in the room or they will talk right through me. They have to know I am like a lion tamer who says, “if you come near me, I’ll kill you.” (55)

“If you love the wrong person, there is a point where you must walk away, not matter what it does to you.” (66)

“Nobody else will ever have your ambition, will ever hand your success to you, so you had better go out and achieve it yourself.” (70)

“Everybody in the business knows that resumes are mostly lies and no legitimate producer looks at them – or, if they do, they know instantly which are the lies. Nobody ever says, “Oh, I’m going to hire you because I see you were in so-and-so.” If you have a big credit, they already know it.” (77)

“I would think, Please, God, if you’re going to make me a failure, fine. Bud don’t make me a failure at something I don’t want to do.” (84)

“Whenever nobody laughed, Lou Alexander pressed on with energy. If his ego was on the line, he had learned to hide that.” (116)

“He told me that other people’s material only worked well for them, and when I knew who I was, I would know what would work for me.” (119)

“I was experiencing a show business truth – familiarity does not breed contempt, it breeds hope.” (130)

“Even sobbing in the filthy shower in Boston, telling myself, “I’m not going to do this anymore; I’m not going to do it anymore,” I had known I would keep on going, no matter what. My parents were not going to defeat me.” (147)

“All of us in comedy have had our Show Bars, our hideous low points that almost destroy us – except that we come back to have more of them – walking out on stages hundreds and hundreds of times when lights are broken, when microphones do not work, when audiences are hostile, when our material stinks. That is what makes you tough. That is what changes you from a happy amateur to a professional, tans your hide, turns you, eventually, leathery.” (149)

“I could not endure the reality that I might end up Joan Molinsky, an unattractive, nondescript little Jewish girl, run-of-the-mill, who might just as well have stayed in Brooklyn and married the druggist and had a normal life. I had come from normal life, from real life, and nobody there had been happy. I knew I had to be special, had to have a life different from anything I had ever known, and if I ended up ordinary Joan Molinsky, I would always be unhappy and make my husband and children unhappy.” (207)

“How could he be loving when from childhood he had never been taught what it is to love – when his wife did not love him and his children did not love him?” (216)

“The act evolves out of yourself – but not intellectually. It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything – staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change. This is paying your dues, appearing again and again and again on every sort of stage in front of every kind of audience, until you gradually, gradually acquire technique and a stage identity, which is not you, but has your passion, your hurts, your angers, your particular humor.” (217)

“When you begin losing an audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.” (223)

“The only way you can go into show business is to expect no reward at all – which, of course, is impossible. Everybody goes into this business for profit and recognition. The paradox is: If you are not in it for the rewards, they are more likely to come to you. If you are willing to do anything just to work – if you are obsessed – you will make your luck.” (241)

“Talent rises to the surface like the best of cream because there is so little of it. All the neurotics go into this business, the unhappy people, the misfits, and they say, “I’m going to be an actor; I’m going to be a comic.” The ones with talent always make it, unless their neurosis is so great it stops them. Talent shines through.” (241)

“But to maintain success, stamina is more important than talent. You have to learn to be a marathon runner.” (242)

“It was wrong to let a man I would never marry devote his life to me.” (244)

“I discovered the performer’s paradox: the greater the high of a success, the deeper the pit of frustration afterward.” (246)

“Just supporting myself by performing has always been to me major success in show business.” (247)

“I was absorbing a sorry truth of show business – rejection is the norm and acceptance the oddity.” (252)

“You must make crucial choices in comedy, must constantly say, “This is funny, but it is not for me.” (253)

“I was doing hunks that sort of worked, but had no consistent image of myself onstage – and never even thought about it. There was no core to me, nothing that made it all the same girl. I was only trying to be a funny girl – anything for a laugh, whether it fir the character or not. The minute there was no laugh, there was no me – and the audience knew it instantly.” (259)

“I had no concept till then of the incredible dedication of somebody like Tennessee Williams. I had always thought he sat down in his room and wrote A Streetcar Named Desire and brought it to somebody who said, “This is very good, I’ll produce it.” But here was this Pulitzer Prize winner, who had already given us Blanche DuBois, working like a beginner with his first play. After all the pretty parties, all the nice manners, all the big limousines that he pulled up in, there he was day after day in the theater cutting and fixing and pruning and changing and switching and worrying, sitting, hunched forward, making notes in the low box stage at right, where Lincoln would have gotten it.” (276)

“Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Eery night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.” (276)

“Jack Benny once said, “No matter how big you are, you have to get to the stage through the kitchen.” (276)

“The anger and bitterness in him were so great, you could see he would not last long as a comic. He could not keep himself from making a statement – and you cannot make statements through comedy. Your anger can be forty-nine percent and your comedy fifty-one percent, and you are okay. If the anger is fifty-one percent, the comedy is gone. Comedy is anger, but anger is not comedy.” (282)

“I knew that they wanted to laugh and that I was going to fail them. So I had no confidence, and when you walk onstage without confidence, never meeting the audience’s eyes, they smell the fear. Everything is affected – your delivery, your look, your stance.” (301)

“Never trust an audience. Never think they are truly your friends. Get their attention and their respect immediately. You are like a lion tamer on that stage, either master or victim, and there is no in between.” (301)

“I have learned that certain kinds of success can ruin you. If I had been a hit in the Catskills that summer, I would probably not be where I am today. The struggle to make it in the mountains, the browbeating you suffer, defeats many comics. They wake up at age forty and find they are Catskills comics, locked into that groove of humor, sapped of the talent and drive they need to reach the next rung. Once a cruise comic did so well on a cruise ship that he went to his agent and said, “I’m ready for Caesars palace.” The agent answered, “As soon as it floats.” (302)

“It started my lifelong technique of taping every show, replaying the act, making notes, and using the new lines that worked.” (304)

“Lenny Bruce was hysterically funny with total control of his audience. The children were lined up to be fed. I was seeing Jesus.” (307)

“That night I realized the importance of getting down to basics: What are we really talking about? Why are we embarrassed about this? If that is all it is, so what? We need to know what we are really bothered about, need to get in touch with our true feelings and attitudes so we can deal with them.” (308)

“Personal truth means to me talking about your pain, which means stripping everything away, showing all of yourself, not some corner of your life okay for audiences to see. But the risk is awesome. When you open yourself up, talking about things that deeply pain you, perhaps the audience will not be your friend, perhaps when you bare your soul and say, “Here are my thighs,” they may go, “Yeah? So? Waiter, another drink please,” instead of “My god, my God, you’ve been living with this?” That is a tremendous fear to overcome.” (309)

“My pain had found a channel and was spilling through, flooding me with a happy hysteria, goading me to speak fast and make everything funny because at any second I might begin to cry.” (310)

“At last I had become hurt enough, upset enough, angry enough to expose her onstage – and in my act from that night on, the pain kept spilling and spilling and spilling.” (311)

“When you work solely for money, the spark and excitement go and the audience knows it.” (314)

“I wondered to myself why I constantly chose impossible men. Maybe I was picking men who would not stop my career, men I would not have to marry.” (321)

“Freddie used to ask people what they thought of a new performer. “Liked” was the kiss of death. “Loved” or “hated” interested him. At least the performer had aroused emotion. It was the first time being loathed by some people was my big asset.” (330)

“There was within me a primal understanding that I could only be happy alone onstage, talking one-on-one to the audience.” (333)

“They all kept saying, “She goes too far…” and kept coming back, and night after night I was feeling those shock waves of laughter, luxuriating in the appreciation, getting that soaring sensation of liftoff.” (342)

“I learned that if I made even one friend in the audience, then I did not care if the entire rest of the audience turned against me.” (343)

“William Randolph Heart said, “If you write for the masses, you eat with the classes. If you write for the classes, you eat with the masses.” (344)

“I thought a hook was low-class, so it took me years to find mine and it just came naturally. Much later, when my act had really become gossiping over the back fence with audiences, I slipped into “Can we talk?” I said it so much, so automatically, it became my identifying line. People began to know who I was oh – “Oh, yeah, she’s the one who says ‘Can we talk?’” I hate saying it – I do not like anything that’s consciously done. It is too manipulative. But that hook lifted me off a plateau in my career, and what really took me through the roof was talking about personalities.” (347)

“You cannot rely on anything, even while it is happening. You cannot say, “Okay, I’ve reached this level.” You have reached no level. You get up the next morning and you are at the bottom all over again. You have your talent on this day, but you never know whether tomorrow you will be able to look at something and make a joke of it – whether you will still have that gift that came from nowhere and may disappear into nowhere.” (358)

“In a curious way, failure was setting me free. Since show business considered me too old, too shopworn, too shocking, there was nobody left to please except myself – and that, of course, is the real secret of pleasing the audience. When you enjoy what you are doing, they will enjoy it with you.” (364)

As always, if you liked the quotes please buy the book here.

“After a while you don’t bomb anymore. You do better than you might have done, or you do a little worse. But you don’t go out there and just bomb.” (KL 239-240).

“He got laughs—genuine, honest laughs. The sound wafted up from the audience and enveloped him, embraced him, cocoonlike—or maybe like the ring of smoke in an opium den. O’Brien had never used drugs and never would. But this? This was the same thing; this was cocaine.” (KL 1064-1066).

“Conan spent his free time fighting off anxiety and frustration—and depression. He had always been prone to falling into an occasional slough of despond, sometimes even when things were going relatively well.” (KL 1253-1255).

“That day Conan proved he had some mettle. When he entered the building, he stepped into an elevator and was immediately confronted by a reporter from the New York Post, who taunted, “I counted how many laughs Letterman got in his press conference leaving the show and I’m gonna count how many you get!” Far from throwing Conan, the encounter relaxed him. It was when things were calm that he leaned toward depression or panic. When his back was against the wall, he seemed to do things he didn’t know he could do.” (KL 1441-1444).

“The knock was that he didn’t delegate well, mainly because he always seemed certain he could do the job as well or better himself. “Sometimes it’s a curse to be too smart and think you can do too much,” said an NBC executive who worked closely with Zucker for a time.” (KL 1697-1699)

“Earning just enough to live on so that he could show up every night at the Comedy Cellar and go on as the last act. Every weeknight, somewhere near two a.m., Jon Stewart performed before the drunk and the lonely of the New York metropolitan area. “I sucked for two straight years,” Jon would later tell aspiring comics, partly as advice and partly as storm warning.” (KL 1884-1887)

“Leno seared that advice into his psyche. If he wasn’t as gifted as other kids—later, other comics—he would hit them where they might be weak: their work ethic.” (KL 1954-1955).

“He was living by what he called “the first rule of show business: Don’t create anything bigger than your act.” Jay interpreted the rule to mean that, if you found yourself consumed by something bigger than what you are known for, your downfall was assured. If something distracting or dispiriting was going on in his life, his duty was to shrug it off, get back in the game of telling jokes, and be funny, day in, day out.” (KL 2036-2039).

“As Zucker had often said before, “It’s sometimes easier to see the world when you’re flat on your back.” (KL 2909-2910).

“Michaels still believed that what worked on late-night talk shows was a host people could identify with and like. “The more time you fill on television, the more and more of you comes out,” Michaels said. “These jobs define overexposure.”  (KL 3093-3095).

“Every night the show, for good or for bad, defined who he was. The act of stepping out nearly daily onto a stage and standing in front of people, millions of people, and soliciting laughs almost defined the term narcissism. Every performer would have needed an outsize ego to get through that crucible every night. Clearly the two giants of this late-night era had that in common, but they reacted to it in totally opposite ways. Jay Leno told friends and colleagues he had the easiest job in the world. One friend remembered hearing Jay say that and replying, “Jay, I know you’re at ease with what you do. But you really think you have the easiest job in the world? Every night getting a report card? Nobody else’s job gives them a grade every time they finish up their work. No, Jay, really this is the opposite of the easiest job.” The same friend also knew Dave well. The significant difference between them, the friend said, was that “with Jay nothing is ever wrong and with Dave nothing is ever right.” Jay’s narcissism took the form of an overarching single-mindedness about his career and the material that fed it. To some close observers of Jay over the years, the Tonight Show star didn’t seem to be living life so much as he seemed to be living comedy material.” (KL 4013-4022).

“I think Conan chooses not to have a point of view, unlike Jay, who doesn’t really have the mentality to have one.” (KL 4189-4190).

“Conan thought they were working at looking sympathetic, following some lesson that had been taught at corporate school.” (Kindle Location 5364).

“Early on, Conan had said, “I don’t care what happens in my career as long as it’s interesting.” (Kindle Location 6351).

“Here’s big point number two in show business: Hang around! Just stay there, just be there! The old cliché: 95 percent is just showing up. OK, I’m on at twelve; I’m still showing up. You never leave!” (KL 7012-7013).

“Conan was trying to be both outrageous and mainstream. “You can’t be both things. He didn’t have enough time. He was three-quarters of the way there.” (KL 7045-7046).

Lorne walked into Segelstein’s office, sat down, and laid out all the reasons he had decided to resign. And Segelstein, who had a sardonic streak, listened patiently, not uttering a word until Michaels had finished. Then he launched into a story, a parable of sorts, one that touched on the religion of television. “Let me just take you through what will happen when you leave,” Segelstein began. “When you leave, the show will get worse. But not all of a sudden—gradually. And it will take the audience a while to figure that out. Maybe two, maybe three years. And when it gets to be, you know, awful, and the audience has abandoned it, then we will cancel it. And the show will be gone, but we will still be here, because we’re the network and we are eternal. If you read your contract closely, it says that the show is to be ninety minutes in length. It is to cost X. That’s the budget. Nowhere in that do we ever say that it has to be good. And if you are so robotic and driven that you feel the pressure to push yourself in that way to make it good, don’t come to us and say you’ve been treated unfairly, because you’re trying hard to make it good and we’re getting in your way. Because at no point did we ask for it to be good. That you’re neurotic is a bonus to us. Our job is to lie, cheat, and steal—and your job is to do the show.” (KL 7136-7145).

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“Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.” (7)

“Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent.” (8)

“Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.” (8)

“Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose.” (8)

“By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.” (18)

“A Manhattan writer I know never leaves his apartment without reminding himself to “come back with a face.” Whether he’s walking down the street or sitting on a park bench or riding the subway or standing on a checkout line, he looks for a compelling face and works up a rich description of it in his mind. When he has a moment, he writes it all down in his notebook.” (30)

“Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.” (31)

“Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you’ll learn to do it better.” (32)

“The golfer Ben Hogan said, “Every day you don’t practice you’re one day further from being good.” If it’s something you want to do, make the time.” (32)

“Make it your priority. Work around it. Once your basic needs are taken care of, money is there to be used. What better investment than in yourself?” (32)

“Immerse yourself in the details of the work. Commit yourself to mastering every aspect. At the same time, step back to see if the work scans, if it’s intelligible to an unwashed audience. Don’t get so involved that you lose what you’re trying to say.” (41)

“Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.” (66)

“Every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways, is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you. How you adapt is your choice.” (77)

“Never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.” (84)

“There’s a difference between a work’s beginning and starting to work.” (91)

“You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.” (97)

“Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don’t want to stuff your material in someone else’s envelope. You don’t want to know the envelope has been invented.” (105)

“Ideas will come to you more quickly if you’ve been putting in the time at your chosen craft.” (105)

“Mark Twain said, “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” (110)

“What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.” (110)

“When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position.” (113)

“Giving yourself a handicap to overcome will force you to think in a new and slightly different way.” (114)

“A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears.” (119)

“In creative endeavors luck is a skill.” (120)

“The more you are in the room working, experimenting, banging away at your objective, the more luck has a chance of biting you on the nose.” (121)

“It’s vital to know the difference between good planning and too much planning.” (122)

“Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.” (126)

“It’s tempting to believe that the quantity and quality of our creative productivity would increase exponentially if only we could afford everything we’ve imagined, but I’ve seen too many artists dry up the moment they had enough money in the bank.” (126)

“Obligation is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working.” (127)

“You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.” (128)

“Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.” (128)

“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.” (129)

“You can’t overthink when you don’t have time to think at all.” (132)

“Too much planning implies you’ve got it all under control. That’s boring, unrealistic, and dangerous. It lulls you into a complacency that removes one of the artist’s most valuable conditions: being pissed.” (133)

“Art is competitive with yourself, with the past, with the future.” (133)

“Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom:
“Why do I have to obey the rules?”
“Why can’t I be different?”
“Why can’t I do it my way?”” (133)

“To force change, you have to attack the work with outrage and violence.” (135)

“My perfect world does not exist, but it’s there as a goal. What are the conditions of your perfect world? Which of them are essential, and which can you work around?” (136)

“How to be lucky: Be generous. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you.” (136)

“New collaborators bring new vectors of energy into your static world – and they can be combustible.” (137)

“Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.” (144)

“Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you. Without it, you are just a font of unfulfilled ideas. Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence, allowing you to dare to be simple.” (163)

“Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.” (164)

“Learn to do for yourself. It’s the only way to broaden your skills.” (165)

“Personality is a skill.” (165)

“One of her skills, and a great deal of her charm, was this built-in sense of humility. The greatest dancers have that.” (165)

“Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them.” (165)

“Perfect practice makes perfect.” (165)

“The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.” (166)

“Practice without purpose, however, is nothing more than exercise. Too many people practice what they’re already good at and neglect the skills that need more work.” (167)

“The great ones shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.” (167)

“The golfer Davis Love III was taught by his father to think of practice as a huge circle, like a clock. You work on a skill until you master it, and then you move on to the next one. When you’ve mastered that, you move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and eventually you’ll come full circle to the task that you began with, which will now need remedial work because of all the time you’ve spent on other things.” (167)

“Switching genres was Beethoven’s way of maintaining his inexperience, and as a result, enlarging his art.” (168)

“Analyze your own skill set. See where you’re strong and where you need dramatic improvement, and tackle those lagging skills first.” (169)

“Japanese sword fighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.” (169)

“We need this breadth and passion if we’re going ot keep perfecting our craft, whether or not there is approval, validation, or money coming from it.” (173)

“Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.” (173)

“The willingness to take directions is a skill noticed mostly when absent.” (175)

“The more you know, the better you can imagine.” (177)

““We’ve always done it this way” is not a good enough reason to keep doing it if it isn’t working.” (186)

“When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.” (187)

“You’ve got two minutes to come up with sixty uses for the stool. A lot of interesting things happen when you set an aggressive quota, even with ideas. People’s competitive juices are stirred. Instead of panicking they focus, and with that comes an increased fluency and agility of mind. People are forced to suspend critical thinking. To meet the quota, they put their internal critic on hold and let everything out. They’re no longer choking off good impulses.” (191)

“Sometimes you can’t identify a good idea until you’ve considered and discarded the bad ones.” (192)

“If you’re in a creative rut, the easiest way to challenge assumptions is to switch things around them and make the switch work. The process goes like this:

1. Identify the concept that isn’t working.
2. Write down your assumptions about it.
3. Challenge the assumptions.
4. Act on the challenge.” (193)

“Jerry Robbins made a point of going to see everything because he could find something useful in even the worst productions. He’d sit there, viewing the catastrophe onstage, and imagine how he would have done it differently. A bad evening at the theater for everyone else was a creative workout for him.” (195)

“There’s no point in analyzing it. If you could figure out how you get into a groove you could figure out how to maintain it. That’s not going to happen. The best you can hope for is the wisdom and good fortune to occasionally fall into a groove.” (196)

“Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start.” (207)

“There comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.” (208)

“You can’t be stoic and strong about everything. Some things in life are just meant to be enjoyed simply because you enjoy them. They are their own rationale.” (209)

“You do your best work after your biggest disasters.” (214)

“It’s vital to be able to forget the pain of failure while retaining the lessons from it.” (214)

“You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.” (218)

“If you don’t have a broad base of skills, you’re limiting the number of problems you can solve when trouble hits.” (222)

“When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous “one percent inspiration,” abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.” (233)

“An artist’s ultimate goal is the achievement of mastery.” (240)

“Every time you set out to create something new, you have to prove to yourself you can still do it at least as well as, if not better than, you did it before. You can not rest on your creative laurels.” (241)

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“Many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started.” (3)

“Research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.” (4)

“If customer ignorance is a profit center for you, you’re in trouble.” (11)

“Today, in a change that is historically quite sudden, financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.” (12)

“Being good at whatever we want to do is among the deepest sources of fulfillment we will ever know.” (16)

“One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.” (18)

“There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’ for high achievers.” (19)

“Over and over, the researchers found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training. “(23)

“IQ is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, IQ predicts little or nothing about performance.” (45)

“No matter who they were, or what explanation of their performance was being advanced, it always took them many years to become excellent, and if a person achieves elite status only after many years of toil, assigning the principal role in that success to innate gifts becomes problematic, to say the least.” (61)

“In math, science, musical composition, swimming, X-ray diagnosis, tennis, literature – no one, not even the most “talented” performers, became great without at least ten years of very hard preparation.” (62)

“Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual such as chess or business related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.” (66)

“Anyone who thinks they’ve outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view.” (67)

“At the driving range or at the piano, most of us, as adults, are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.” (68)

“The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.” (68)

“Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily; while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don’t even know how to approach them.” (69)

“Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing oneself to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder – these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.” (69)

“You can work on technique all you like, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen: You won’t get any better, and you’ll stop caring.” (70)

“Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Instead of doing what we’re good at, we insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. After each repetition, we force ourselves to see – or get others to tell us – exactly what still isn’t right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what we’ve just done. We continue that process until we’re mentally exhausted.” (71)

“The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people wont’ do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.” (72)

“Deliberate practice does not fully explain achievement – real life is too complicated for that. Most obviously, we’re all affected by luck; time and chance happeneth to us all.” (79)

“Genes could play a role in a person’s willingness to put himself or herself through the extremely rigorous demands of becoming an exceptional performer.” (81)

“Frequently when we see great performers doing what they do, it strikes us that they’ve practice for so long, and done it so many times, they can just do it automatically. But in fact, what they have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.” (82)

“Great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice – avoiding automaticity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible.” (83)

“Practice is all about pushing ourselves just beyond what we can currently do.” (84)

“We can see mentors in a new way – not just as wise people to whom we turn for guidance, but as experienced masters in our field who can advise us on the skills and abilities we need to acquire next, and can give us feedback on how we’re doing.” (109)

“The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.” (117)

“Too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.” (119)

“A mental model is never finished. Great performers not only possess highly developed mental models, they are also always expanding and revising those models.” (124)

“Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown.” (128)

“Some of the worst teams I’ve ever seen have been those where everybody was a potential CEO,” says David Nadler. “If there’s a zero-sum game called succession going on, it’s very difficult to have an effective team.” (137)

“Reciprocal vulnerability is the beginning of trust. But the process can be rushed only so much.” (139)

“Just as great individual performers possess highly developed mental models of their domains, the best teams are composed of members who share a mental model – of the domain, and of how the team will be effective.” (141)

“In a world that forces that push toward the commoditization of everything, creating something new and different is the only way to survive. A product unlike any other can’t be commoditized. A service that reaches deep into the psyche of the buyer can never be purchased solely on price. Creating such products and services was always valuable; now it’s essential.” (146)

“As products and services live shorter lives, so do the business models of the companies that sell them.” (147)

“The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen fields, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it.” (155)

“In many creative fields the person who pursues an advanced degree has consciously chosen a path that leads to a professorship, not to a life of innovating in that domain.” (156)

“Innovation doesn’t reject the past; on the contrary, it relies heavily on the past and comes most readily to those who’ve mastered the domain as it exists.” (157)

“People who are internally driven to create do seem more creative than those who are just doing it for the money.” (164)

“Excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else – except in their field of expertise.” (180)

“The consistent finding reported by many researchers examining many domains is that high creative achievement and intrinsic motivation go together. Creative people are focused on the task (How can I solve this problem?) and not on themselves (What will solving this problem do for me?).” (189)

“The people who do become top-level achievers are rarely child prodigies.” (197)

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“Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.” (1)

“The Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” (13)

“The Hedgehog Concept: To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. Just because something is your core business – just because you’ve been doing it for years or perhaps even decades – does not necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business absolutely cannot form the basis of a great company.” (13)

“No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment.” (14)\

“The best students are those who never quite believe their professors.” (16)

“I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.” – Darwin Smith, CEO of Kimberly-Clark (20)

“The right people don’t need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.” (42)

“IF you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” (42)

“The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.” (56)

“The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems.” (59)

“Managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great.” (59)

“No matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.” (62)

“The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse.” (72)

“Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time… if you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated.” (74)

“All good-to-great companies attained a very simple concept that they used as a frame of reference for all their decisions.” (95)

“Consider what you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at).” (95)

“You can be passionate all you want, but if you can’t be the best at it or it doesn’t make economic sense, then you might have a lot of fun, but you won’t produce great results.” (97)

“You can’t manufacture passion or “motivate” people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.” (109)

“You might wonder about what type of person gets all jazzed up about making a bank as efficient as McDonald’s, or who considers a diaper charismatic. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that they felt passionate about what they were doing and the passion was deep and genuine.” (110)

“It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.” (114)

“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline – a problem that largely goes way if you have the right people in the first place.” (121)

“Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turns drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increase the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth.” (121)

“Good to great” lies in the discipline to do whatever it takes to become the best within carefully selected arenas and then to seek continual improvement from there.” (128)

“Your status and authority in Nucor come from your leadership capabilities, not your position.” (138)

““Stop doing” lists are more important than “to do” lists.” (143)

“When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it.” (152)

“You cannot make good use of technology until you know which technologies are relevant.” (153)

“Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.” (156)

“Technology cannot turn a good enterprise into a great one, nor by itself prevent disaster.” (158)

“Those who built the good-to-great companies weren’t motivated by fear. They weren’t driven by fear of what they didn’t understand. They weren’t drive by fear of looking like a chump. They weren’t driven by fear of watching others hit it big while they didn’t. they weren’t driven by the fear of being hammered by the competition. No, those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and a n inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake. Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity, in contrast, are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.” (160)

“Lasting transformations from good to great follow a general pattern of buildup followed by breakthrough.” (172)

“In a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.” (194)

“Core values are essential for enduring greatness, but it doesn’t seem to matter what those core values are.” (195)

“It is much easier to become great than to remain great.” (204)

“The point is to realize that much of what we’re doing is at best a waste of energy. If we organized the majority of our work time around applying these principles, and pretty much ignored or stopped doing everything else, our lives would be simpler and our results vastly improved.” (205)

“Those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity. Yes, turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out. Conversely, perpetuating mediocrity is an inherently depressing process and drains much more energy out of the pool than it puts back in.” (208)

“if you’re doing something you care that much about, and you believe in its purpose deeply enough, then it is impossible to imagine not trying to make it great. It’s just a given.” (208)

“You don’t need to have some grand existential reason for why you love what you’re doing or to care deeply about your work (although yo might). All that matters is that you do love it and that you do care.” (209)

“The real question is no, “Why greatness?” but “What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, “Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.” (209)

“In the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. and it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.” (210)

“The single biggest danger in business and life, other than outright failure, is to be successful without being resolutely clear about why you are successful in the first place.” –Robert Burgelman, Stanford Professor (213)

“Fair or not, people – especially in the United States – can forgive a lot of sins, but will never forget or forgive feeling lied to.” (215)

“It is not the content of a company’s values that correlates with performance, but the strength of conviction with which it holds those values, whatever they might be.” (215)

“Widen your definition of “right people” to focus more on the character attributes of the person and less on specialized knowledge. People can learn skills and acquire knowledge, but they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.” (216)

”Take advantage of difficult economic times to hire great people, even if you don’t have a specific job in mind.” (217)

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