Quotes from Ty Burrell

People discuss parenting the way they talk about denominations of faith.

Comedy can be fun no matter what you're playing. It always has the potential to be a blast.

I didn't know that there was such a thing as butter carving. But then, I poked around a little bit. A quick Google search will show you 55,000 images of butter carvings, and they're extraordinary.

I'm not very romantic. My idea of romance is more practical - like washing the car.

Once you do a show like 'Modern Family,' which has been an amazing thing, and I'm so happy about it, it does make it a little challenging to do other things.

My favourite game is wiffle ball, a fake version of baseball with a plastic ball and bat that's really for kids.

I'm not taciturn and stoic.

The world can make an actor feel overly important. What I do isn't hard work. It's not ditch digging - which I have done, for one summer. Of course there are times when your fuel tank's low, but even on the hardest days, you are on a film set. You are doing something creative.

Our house was a place where you were welcome to make an idiot out of yourself. Silliness was valued. My dad worked with foster kids in the foster care system, and I think silliness was a way for him to leaven things up.

You know, I used to think I was a foodie, and then my wife went to culinary school and basically explained to me that I was just a guy that likes to eat.

I've played a lot of really smarmy people in film, and it can be real fun, don't get me wrong. But it can be characters I'm not as excited to explore.

Everything I do from now on, I'll have a mustache. I can promise you that. I don't care who I have to convince. If you see me with a mustache in a movie or on stage in the future, you'll know that I pitched the idea.

I'm prone to hyperbole.

I don't know why, but it seems to be a common story for actors and comedians to have a tendency to be bad students and have difficulty focusing on things.

I grew up on 'Monty Python.'

I can't grow a beard.

My wife handles all of our technology. So if something goes wrong with the computer, I throw up my arms and step aside while the IT gal figures it out.

I'm not handy.

I think once I fail enough as a dad, I'll be looking for help wherever I can get it. I just need enough time to screw things up and then I'll start looking to TV dads for advice.

My younger brother and I have been writing together, mainly for fun, for years, but we've been improvising together since we were kids. Literally.

There's nobody in my family that's in performance or in the business in any way, so it was not something that was encouraged as a profession. It was more just encouraged as a personality trait.

A lot of modern comedies are difficult to watch too, because they're so ironic and so detached and so quote-unquote clever. They kind of keep you at arm's length. They can be really funny, but they're not really nourishing.

There's no private side to acting, which some people find hard. I've drawn inspiration from athletes. They manage to be themselves under the pressure of public scrutiny, and they have it much harder - they have to perform with people yelling at them.

It's kind of a crazy thing with kid actors because a lot of them get hired without people really knowing if they're good or not. They get hired for the way they look at a really young age. You also have your fingers crossed around kid actors... because the lessons they learn on set aren't always the best. You can really get whatever you want.