Quotes from Brad Hall

New York is just such a perfect place for romance.

Julia is one of the most loyal people who ever lived. Her best friend is her best friend from third grade, and her other best friends are her best friends from Northwestern. Once you're a pal, you're a pal for life with Jules. I'm not just flattering her because she's my wife.

In New York you go to the coffee shop, have a bagel, walk down the street, get hassled, run into someone else. People just waltz into your world and it's believable.

I don't have a lot of lifetime regrets, and very few show business regrets, surely.

People are a lot more tolerant when they're home watching TV and they're looking for a laugh.

I could have been a mediocre tap dancer.

No one remembers this because it's the whipping boy, but 'The Single Guy' was very well-reviewed and watched, and then the central concept became attacked by the very people who were putting it on. And then the next thing you know you're running in fear, and everyone stops being funny.

Audiences want to see people break rules for love, to challenge the fates for love.

The truth of the matter is that it's not much less work to do a short than it is to do a feature. Particularly when you're running around different countries.

'Saturday Night Live' is a whole different arena. It's great fun and I love it and that's what we do in the Practical theater. I believe in it wholeheartedly and will do it the rest of my life. But there's also legitimate theater, be it comedy, drama, classics or modern plays which I think is important and something I want to be involved in too.

Comics and actors come from such a wide variety of backgrounds and there's a theory that all comedians had tortured youths.

I can do a Green Day joke and people actually get it.

If you're on Thursday night at 8:30, because the history of that time slot has been so disastrous, there's a hell of a lot of numbers pressure.

It all depends what you look like. If you look like hell and walk down the street, they think you're just another bum. If you're being cool, you TV people don't get recognized. But if you're going to sign autographs and records, then you'll have some trouble.

Those regrets that I do have are, exclusively, not doing plays that I wish I had done.

You have to run, an awful lot, on instinct. Even on 'Veep,' it's not like you get weeks of rehearsal to break out what's going on in the scenes.

When you romanticize something so extraordinarily in the hopes that it will divert you from agony, you're destined for a letdown.

It's a really special skill to be able to pick up a phone the way that a human picks up a phone. It's not as easy as you think.

There is a dark side to being single in a great big city like New York. There's this sense of isolation and I think you can get fairly desperate.

When I go to see theater, I'm consumed with professional jealousy.

I mean, if you look at all the great romantic screwbally kind of movies from the '30s and '40s, they're all in New York. Even 'Sleepless in Seattle,' a movie about Seattle, ends up in New York, of course. The whole country, even if they've never been to New York, knows about it... from the movies.

The casualness with which people say hello to Julia on the street is hilarious to me.

I think the fact that I'm married to Julia, people like to take shots at me.

The theater was the place where I felt my first crush, and it's where I got my first kiss.