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" 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' is one of my favorite movies, and I laugh all the time, and I cry during the one funeral. But I'll say that 'Monsters, Inc.' is a movie that really gets me super-emotional. Especially the ending. "

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" I always felt that it was never the duty of a person to really stand up for their gender or their race or anything like that - I always felt that was a personal choice. But I do feel now that maybe my opinion is evolving or changing a little bit. "

Kumail Nanjiani

Stand

Stand Up

Choice

" Most of my exposure to American pop culture was through this weird prism of 'Mad' magazine. "

" I want to be so famous that I'm the pop-culture reference that people would make to try and be racist to me. So I'd be walking down the street, and someone would be, like, 'Hey, look at this Kumail Nanjiani.' "

Kumail Nanjiani

People

Walking

" I was actually looking at the poster for 'Tarzan,' and I was thinking how abs look so different now. These are not your grandma's abs. They go so deep and so sharp now. "

Kumail Nanjiani

Now

Deep

" Being a fish out of water is tough, but that's how you evolve. "

" I didn't know if I could be funny on stage or write a joke. But I saw that there are no rules. If you're funny offstage, you can figure out a way to be funny onstage. "

" You really need to have that discipline. It's not even discipline. I just put down these rules. It's not like a vague, 'Motivate yourself!' and do something. It's specific hours set aside every day for certain things. "

" My parents aren't the demographic for a lot of things I do. If I did a stand-up show, and I saw 62-year-old Pakistanis in the crowd, I'd be like, 'I'm gonna bomb.' "

Kumail Nanjiani

Parents

Lot

" I started doing standup because of Hugh Grant's best-man speech in 'Four Weddings,' which is basically a standup routine. "

" Wikipedia is kind of weird. I feel it's lame to put up my own page, but I desperately want someone else to do it. "

" Studio execs were like, ''Lord of the Rings!' People want to see sword-and-dragon-type things!' No, people just want to see great stories. Hollywood always takes the wrong lesson from successes. "

" When generally people make race-based jokes to me - even if they're not technically racist, they're sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever - on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context. "

Kumail Nanjiani

You

Weird

" I thought, from watching TV and stuff, that America was one place. They only show you L.A. and New York. They don't warn you about Iowa. "

" I just hope that there's a market for somebody who looks like me as the lead of a rom-com, you know? "

Kumail Nanjiani

Looks

Know

" The world is getting smaller. And people are bumping up against people from different parts of the world with very different points of view. The challenge of our time is going to be, how do you allow other points of view to exist within what you traditionally see as your world? "

" Populate your life with people different from you. Once you leave school, you get to choose the kinds of people you're going to be around rather than forced to be around them. "

" Most people don't really do too many things because they're afraid they'll fail. There are people failing all the time, all around you. And nobody is going to notice your failure. Your failure is not going to be so spectacular that people write news stories about it. Your failure will be boring. "

" I moved to New York first and was really apprehensive about moving to L.A., but I really, really like it. "

Kumail Nanjiani

Moving

New

" I don't want to generalize, but the target audience for a lot of the YouTube people is fairly young - under the age of 16. You still want to know what those people are watching, because I think it's interesting, but sometimes it just makes you feel old. "

" I'd love to be in action movies. I've been trying to convince people. I don't think it's anything physical holding me back. I think it's a general vibe thing that's holding me back. I don't project action confidence, maybe. "

Kumail Nanjiani

Confidence

Love

" I used to like to come up with inventions because I hated working so much when I had my day job. I thought, 'All I need is a great idea, and I'm out of here.' "

" Nobody really knows what they're doing. Some are just better at pretending like they do. "

Kumail Nanjiani

Pretending

Nobody

" My parents don't really understand my career. They don't really bring it up that much. "

Kumail Nanjiani

Understand

Parents

" My favorite writer on 'The X-Files' is this guy Darin Morgan. He wrote my favorite episode and the top five favorite episodes that everyone loves. "

" I'm from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor. "

Kumail Nanjiani

Family

Doctor

" If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives. "

" Think about when you were 12 or 13. The stuff I watched was awful! I tried to watch a 'He-Man' cartoon recently, and I was like, 'Oh my God!' I just had, like, a small brain. I was stupid. "

" Living in Pakistan, you didn't have a sense of how huge and varied America was geographically. I had visited once. I thought of it as this crazy, happy, exciting place where everybody's rich, and there's stuff everywhere. Compared to Pakistan, it's not untrue. Compared to Pakistan, the streets are paved with gold. "

" When I started working on 'Michael And Michael,' it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone. "

" I'm a massive rom-com head! Like, every rom-com in the '90s and early 2000s, I've watched. "