Andy Richter Quotations

Since she got a cause and stopped being funny. I think she's real funny, but lately it's all been hearts and flowers and tears and saving teenagers and creating a role model. And that ain't funny. No giggles there.

Robert called me and said, "I'm gonna be working with this guy Conan O'Brien who's taking over Letterman's show. Do you wanna meet him, maybe get a job as a writer on the show?" And I said yeah, I'm tired of eating baloney. I had started to apply for day jobs, which up till that point I had been able to avoid for three years, you know, waiting on tables or whatever.

When I first started working, it was a little bit like that. They said, "Come be a writer, but we'll find a place for you to perform somehow." Initially, I wasn't that helpful as a writer. Because, if you tell me what the bit is, I can come up with jokes for it. I can write dialogue, but what they needed was guys who could say, Okay, it's a machine where you put in a piece of fruit and pull on this lever and out comes a celebrity joke.

I have a wife and child, and I guess that would constitute a family, and sometimes I watch shows where the people aren't related. And I don't get nervous, get the sweats, and have to run out of the room. I mean, I can handle it.

I never just sit down and see what's on TV anymore. And also, I hate almost everything, so that keeps you reading magazines and doing crossword puzzles or whatever.

My ability to notice that kind of thing, the sanctity of the bubble that you create, has not been so good in a way, in that I notice it concurrently with actually doing the thing. I always notice it in retrospect.

Well, I refer to 'Celebrity Jeopardy ' as the short-bus 'Jeopardy,' because it is a lot easier. Like, there was a whole column basically naming stores in New York.

I was prom king. Which is actually saying I was the sixth most popular, because the five who were on homecoming were automatically disqualified from prom, so of course I have to look at it that way.

There are naked people in boots on a mountain top firing guns.

Anything that I read, I read because I'm interested in it.

One of the big tensions in my life is that I have known the stresses of financial hardship since I was a little kid, and it is the cancer for which I am seeking a cure.

But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.

I've always tried to be nice to people, so that sort of translates into popularity, I guess.

I watch mediocre shows that have been on for three or four seasons, and feel angry at them.

I think the people that are best at something, they don't think about it much. That's the whole key to being good at anything.

At a very basic level, I think television exists for game shows, and I think it always will.

I briefly considered doing Edgar Allan Poe and just swearing a lot.

I mean, I'll say the filthiest things in the world, but when it comes down to it, I'm kind of a prude.

Tell me what you want, and then I'll put in what I want... after I'm done with my codependent providing for you, I'll get a little for me too.

If somebody's looking at pictures of naked people and you go, 'Oh I don't want to see that,' you're lying. Cause naked people are always interesting. Always. Whether they're beautiful, or naked or 500 pounds.

I'm not that professional.

If you start to just aim for what the audience wants to hear, you're already hamstrung because you don't have any freedom.

I actually find something rewarding about that tension between satisfying myself and satisfying others. Because first of all, I can't provide my own structure, and that tension provides a structure for me to actually work within.

It's a very nice thing to have a baby.

No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!

Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.

The thing that's important for me to focus on is the balancing of the tension between satisfying myself and satisfying an audience, and making something that I think is good and funny, worthwhile, small-"i" important, versus something that's going to do well.

The people on 'Quintuplets' were great, but I wasn't a producer on that show, and it wasn't exactly my taste.

I wouldn't want to be a talk show host. That's another awkward compliment people make. 'You should have your own talk show.' And I think, no thank you.

It's funny, because 'Arrested Development' is tied to Andy Richter in a few different ways. For me personally, after I did Andy Richter, one of the next things I did was a show called 'Quintuplets' for a season for Fox, and this was while 'Arrested Development' was on. I used to go over and hang out on their set.

We've been swimming at nude beaches and I love to go skinny dipping, but I'm sorry, sitting on top of a mountain, that's just, you're trying to show off or something. That's ridiculous.

Conan has to provide so much more talk than I do. He has to be interviewing. I get to sit there and if I don't say anything, there's no loss.

It's like, what do I need you for? ... I just need a camcorder.

The basic equation that mystified me as a young man was looking at guys who could actually get girls. I was always amazed, because they never seemed to care. I was like, 'How do they do that?'

I want to get back and figure out how we're going to make 'The Tonight Show' funny and good.

I kinda feel like I know the funniest people. I guess Bill Murray. It's really, really hard for him to do wrong in my estimate. We just rented The Man Who Knew Too Little, and it's a pretty misguided movie. But there are things that he does that are so funny.

Because homecoming came first, and there was the homecoming court. The five guys on homecoming court were disqualified from being in the prom court. So being prom king was being sixth most popular.

The desire to do different things was the main motivator that made me leave late night because I'd been there seven years. The combination of an entrepreneurial desire to see how far I could push my success and a short attention span. But now I've done other things. And I'm sort of ready to sit somewhere and sit in the same place for a while.