Quotes from Christopher Guest

I talk to people of different ages, and a guy who's 38 who says, 'I could've played Major League Baseball, but I had this knee injury...' Yeah, probably not. It's a big thing with men and sports, where they think they could have touched that thing.

All these movies are observational comedies. I see somebody, maybe a dry cleaner, and notice how they are. Maybe I'll decide to turn a person with those traits into a studio chief.

I don't know anyone who's ever taken a bus. It's a mysterious form of transportation.

My daughter recommended Chris O'Dowd to me after seeing him in 'Bridesmaids,' so I watched that and his sitcom, 'The IT Crowd.' When I was over in London, we met up, and I knew immediately he was the right person.

If you don't like the people, you're just doing a sketch. Which, in most cases, is comedy minus some emotional backbone.

It's difficult to articulate how I know it's the right actor, but I do. It's instinct. Intuition.

What I'm doing in the work I do, I prefer not to just have a series of jokes. It's nice when audiences can connect with the characters as well.

I'm married to the person I fell in love with.

I started on the clarinet. I was going to a music school - my mother took me - and the guy said, 'What do you want to play?' I said the drums, and my mother said, 'No, you don't. You don't want to play the drums.' So I said, 'Maybe the trumpet would be cool.' And my mother said, 'I don't think so.' And then the clarinet was handed to me.

The truth of it is that people are not going to want to go to improvisational theater if it's not funny. You can succeed in doing all the things you're supposed to do - be truthful to scene - and if it's not funny, I'm telling you that no one's gonna care.

I went to Bard College for a year. And then, even though I didn't think I should give my blood to the theater, I did go to N.Y.U., which is where I met Michael McKean.

'Waiting For Guffman' was different right away from 'Spinal Tap,' because we didn't show the interviewer. That person became invisible immediately. That created a different way of tuning it and ultimately editing it.

There's something about that idea of looking up and hoping, and thinking, 'I'm good.' Some things, like show business, are absolutely subjective. People look at a TV show and think, 'I could do that.' And maybe they could do that. But they're not.

My passion is more specific, in the sense that I've always liked doing comedy. I've always liked doing music. I like acting. And apparently, you need those things in movies.

I don't know if I'd mastered that documentary format, but I wanted to move on from it.

Folk musicians have a lot of the same self-importance, but they're way more cruel and jealous than rock musicians - I know this for a fact because I used to be a folk musician.

I'm a fly fisherman. I make flies. They're imitations of insects at different stages in their development.

The main thing that's important to me is getting to do whatever project it is the way that I do what I do, and that's different. To go to an entity - whether it's a traditional film studio or some newer company, or HBO, Amazon or Netflix - they would have to know that I need to work the way I work.

Nothing is cut while I'm shooting. I edit between nine months and a year, and usually have around 80 hours of footage I have to get down to an 82-minute movie.

Mean doesn't last. Mean is over fast. Maybe this is the essence of everything, which is, to me, if there is no emotional center for what I'm doing, I have no interest in it at all.

The minute the money is more, you lose your control, so then there's no point.

In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page.

I was never in an improv group. But when I went to school, we would do it all day long with friends, not knowing what it was called.

I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things.