Quotes from Keegan-Michael Key

Success isn't measured by the amount of people that watch you unless you allow it to be.

It's when you're true to yourself that resonates with other people.

At times, I can be vocal about what I think people want to hear as opposed to being vocal about what I really feel.

You can not have comedy unless people are behaving badly. You can't have it.

When you're a child, the most important thing is to be able to live a life of comfort. You want to be sure that the moon goes up at night and the sun comes up in the morning and dad comes home from work.

Surprise is not humor. I think that there can be a fine line there.

I don't know if people would be surprised by this or not, but I'm kind of into nutrition and weight lifting. I know I'm kind of a slender man, but the human physique fascinates me, and learning about metabolism.

My father has passed away. He was African-American. My mother is white. So I was adopted by a couple that was of a similar dynamic as my biological parents.

I want people to say, "Oh my God, I'm laughing out loud at television."

There's a very famous South African playwright named Athol Fugard, and I'd be in any play he's ever did.

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.

I'm a great consumer of kung-fu movies - mid-'70s to late-'80s.

I want to make movies and pieces of television and pieces of art that crack everyone's assumptions.

Some of the friendliest, friendliest people you're going to meet are going to be in Detroit.

I would like to invest more of my brain space in understanding the history of my city, because whenever I learn about the history of Detroit, it's always so fascinating, from a little kind of beaver-trading post to the place where automobiles were manufactured.

With a lot of my comedic heroes, I'm trying to make sure that, wherever they might have gotten off-track a bit, I've learned that lesson.

You hold precious what you create for yourself in your life that makes you comfortable.

I love dialects and accents; they're something that really resonate with me and that I find fascinating.

There is no top. You are never going to reach the top if you go for success. That way lies madness.

To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture.

There's a thing called the 'One Drop' theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you're black.

We live in a gray world, and I want to tell gray stories.

I was raised Catholic, so guilt shackles you from acting like a complete fool all the time.

Everybody puts on airs, regardless of race.