Quotes from James Roday

I would say I've actually done a lot more comedy than I've done drama. It's weird the way that worked out, because when I came out of theater school I took myself way too seriously, so it's kind of ironic that I ended up sort of going down the comedy path.

People need to laugh and turn their brains off.

USA does such a great job sort of branding and packaging their shows and you know, they move and they sort of you got to keep up, you've really got to keep up with the train.

I get star-struck anytime I meet performers that I grew up watching and appreciating. I mean, it's still incredibly surreal to me that I was a kid in San Antonio watching movies and then now I'm working with some of the people that were in those movies. I don't think it'll ever stop being surreal on some level.

In some ways, especially with social media, I feel like 'Psych' has found another whole life since it went off the air.

I had just come off my third consecutive failed television series. I had sworn off doing TV for a while. I was going to go to New York, sublet an apartment, and find my soul again. Before I got on the plane, my agent sent me the script for 'Psych.' I read it on the plane and realised it had a lot of potential.

I'm a sports fanatic. It's hard for me to commit to the weekly, episodic nature of television, so for me, anytime that I can put a game on, that's what I do.

You do something, like, something like 'Psych' for long enough, it's tough to shake up people's preconceptions of who you are as a performer.

I would say 'Gremlins,' 'Die Hard,' and 'Black Christmas' are all pretty good Christmas movies that aren't really about Christmas.

The more reasons for people to be willing to put their differences aside, the better.

As 'Psych' went on, deeper in the run, I started to feel more of a challenge just because, how many jokes are there? How many times can you reinvent the wheel?

I can watch SportsCenter on a loop, like, five times in a row until my girlfriend is like, 'Seriously? It's the same highlights!' It just brings me peace, I think. Any kind of game - college basketball, college football, obviously anything pro.

'Psych' was so many different things, and they evolved in so many different ways over the years, and towards the end there, we were barely solving mysteries anymore. We were just paying homage to our favorite movies, television shows, and bringing through as many '80s icons as we possibly could.

Acting is certainly my first love, but writing and directing has been on the 'to do' list for a long time.

Have I ever pretended to be something? I think back in college I think I might have told a girl that I was a professional tennis player once. And then, of course, she had never heard of me so I had to dig deeper. 'I'm just sort of on the playing satellites. You know, I'm kind of working my way up. I'm not ranked in the top 100 or anything.'

I came from Texas, I was studying theater at NYU, and I thought for sure that my lot in life would be to get the best bartending job I could find and do theater in New York. And that was a good life.

In the real world, it doesn't always go your way like it can on a television show.

My plan was to go to New York and do some theatre, and then I got the script for 'Psych.' I was like, 'Ahh - just as I thought I was out, you pulled me back in!' I had a great meeting with the show creator and we laid out the parameters to make the show work: what I would do, what he would let me do.

'Monk' planted the seed that a procedural could have character and be quirky and have comedy.

Actors geek out over athletes. Everyone knows that.

They just think I'm a white dude. Every once in a while someone thinks I'm Jewish. I get a lot of stuff, but never Latino.

Gallows humor is part of our coping mechanism. It's part of our grief process. If we don't know what else to do, we laugh. That's a very real thing.

I would say I'm more fascinated by Big Daddy V than I am necessarily a huge fan of Big Daddy V. He simply threw on the double-strapped unitard... and now he's some sort of fearsome, fighting, wrecking machine.

Without banging a drum or getting on a soap box, there are always ebbs and tides in this country in terms of the political and social climate that we might be dealing with at any given moment.