Quotes from Adam McKay

Tom Brokaw was never young.

All you can really do as director is sort of set a tone.

Dick Cheney and Bush's rise to power were built on tons of money from corporations and a dulled press.

You can't really do a big character in an action film; you're already suspending your disbelief in the action, then to suspend your disbelief in the character is too much.

A lot of shorts spend too much time setting up the idea; sometimes they meander.

I hired Tina Fey for 'SNL,' which was certainly a good match. She took off right away there.

I like to remind myself how hard acting is. I do parts in friends' stuff.

I don't think arrested-adolescent humor will fade. Maybe the form will change, but I guarantee its replacement will still be based in immature behavior from mature figures.

When you do comedy, you get impervious to good and bad reviews.

You have to be able to fail with the improv. You have to not care.

If you're calling yourself a maverick and you're not Dirk Nowitzki, then you are probably not one. In fact, this rule applies to anyone declaring themselves a 'God-fearing Christian' or a 'Man of the people.'

In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.

Benito Mussolini created the word 'fascism.' He defined it as 'the merging of the state and the corporation.' He also said a more accurate word would be 'corporatism.' This was the definition in Webster's up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster's and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations.

Voting for Romney after the train wreck of that was the eight years of W. Bush is like losing your pay check playing a rigged game of three-card monte and then playing the same game again a week later 'cause the cards are a different color.

David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He's not only a great director, but he's also a great writer.

We lost our minds in the '80s and '90s; we really as a society just felt that everyone could only care about themselves. There was no responsibility to discuss what's going on in your town, your state, your nation. And it was a blast, it was really fun, but it doesn't work.

It should be a law for one whole year that all laugh tracks are Seth Rogen. The world would get ever so slightly better.

McCain is the kid who was really cool in middle school but never got high school game and people are sick of him acting like he's still popular.

Nothing is funnier than confidently doing the wrong thing.

For some reason, people with comedy, any time they can detect a pattern, it kind of freaks them out. 'Those guys are always together!' Yeah, they're a comedy team. Anything they can recognize as a pattern they think is a hole.

We, Will Ferrell and I, were approached by Sequoia, which is a big financing firm up in Palo Alto; they do a lot of Internet stuff, and they came to us and said they had an idea for a comedy site, and Will and I were sorta like, 'Yeah, we don't know. It's the Internet, we've seen it come and go.'

I hired a personal trainer to help me lose 25 pounds and get from obese to fat. My next step will be to get from fat to chubby.

Nowadays, the truth is, I think a lot of the newer generation of action stars usually are pretty self-deprecating and cool. I mean, Dwayne Johnson is a great example.

Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.