Quotes

When a woman does nudity in a movie, men immediately switch into a sexual mode. For women, from what I understand, it's not like that. They see a naked, out-of-shape man crying and it's funny -- something weird, disturbing and disgusting we can all laugh at.

{On his full-frontal performance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)] I drank a lot to get me through that. I remember just pacing up and down, drunk, with these voices in my head saying, "Jason, what are you doing?" I'm a little nervous, I won't get a date anymore, they won't be satisfied with what they saw.

[on the Muppets] They'e not puppets. We never use the word puppet because Kermit is a frog, Piggy is a pig. They exist in the world, like we do.

One thing that I think never goes out of style is just purity. Niceness and purity. And the Muppets have never lost that. Kermit especially is just wide-eyed wonder, unblinking. And he can't blink. Which I think probably helps.

[on his religion] My father is Jewish and my mother is Christian... but I was raised Jewish. So I'm at this [Christian] school and they really don't like me very much there. And then after Christian school I would walk in the afternoons to Hebrew school, and then at Hebrew school they would tell me that I wasn't really Jewish because my mother is Christian. So all of a sudden I'm like this young kid--I would have been happy to believe whatever--whoever would have been nice to me. You know? But it was this feeling of like not really belonging or not really fitting in... What occurred to me is this certainly isn't God. God doesn't want an 11- and 12-year-old kid to feel this way. You know? That my belief in God is that God wants you. You know? God wants you to believe in him, or it, whatever you would call it. And so, it actually helped me forge this feeling of, "Alright, you know what, kid, it's you and God, and it's you and the world." It gave me a bit of a feeling of solitude that I think came in handy during my out-of-work periods, where when I decided the only way I was going to make it was if I started writing. It was actually--I'm very grateful that I got that feeling at such a young age, because I felt like, "You know what, *you* better do it. It's gotta be you."

[on how he taught himself to play the piano as a teenager] I'm willing to be bad for as long as it takes, until I'm good....I don't have a sense of shame. I just don't. If I've hurt someone's feelings, if I'm mean to somebody, I'll lament over that for days .... But I don't really have the thing of, Oh, I've embarrassed myself. I just don't understand why I would stop trying to play piano even though I'm not good at it. I want to be good at it. So why wouldn't I keep playing?

[on the Muppets] There's CGI now, and there's all these things that are theoretically cooler, but you'll never be able to replace the actual, tactile thing. Like when Kermit scrunches his face? You can't repeat that with CGI. I think when you can sit and make it perfect to the degree you want, you lose some of the humanity of it.

[on trying to write a unique ending] The hard thing about a romantic comedy is that you know how the movie is going to end. The guy's going to end up with the girl it seems like he's going to end up with.

[on how he thought How I Met Your Mother should have ended] And then my other suggestion, which they never used, which I think would be so funny, is -- it's the future, right? I think in one of those scenes, they should open the window, and it should be, like, a post-apocalyptic wasteland outside. It should be like I Am Legend. Horrible mutants.

When I sang that song [onstage] with Maroon 5 and I gave my phone number out, I thought it would be some grand comedy experiment, where I'd save all these voice mails from people propositioning me. And 80 percent of the messages were dudes saying, "Could you give my script to Judd Apatow?"

I'm six feet four. And I entered into this period all of a sudden when I was too big to play a kid and I was too young to play an adult. Like, I couldn't play the lawyer, but I couldn't play the high school kid anymore. I was fuckin' terrified.

I'd been in the same one-bedroom apartment for twelve years -- same apartment I lived in during Freaks and Geeks, same place since I was 17 -- long beyond when I could have afforded a better place, because I was still so scared it was all gonna end.

I may be successful now, but I'm never gonna be super good-looking.