Jay Baruchel quotes:

I enjoy acting, and it's given me a ton of happiness and it's affected my life and my family's lives in ways that we just can't imagine.

Long before I ever started acting, believe it or not, I always knew I wanted to be a director.

Rigidity is the enemy of acting. And I think that people who stay up all night focusing on every beat they're going to do the next day always end up getting screwed.

I have a maple leaf tattoo over my heart, quite literally, and my two favorite things on Earth are being in Canada and making movies.

I like writing strong women, because as a straight male, there's nothing more attractive to me than a strong girl.

I think sports makes for good drama because it has all the same ingredients as anything worth reading or listening to or watching. Conflict, desire, heartbreak - it's all there.

I'm a massive movie nerd. That being said, I could retire tomorrow because I wrote this movie 'Goon' and it came out, and it connected and it's a wonderful flick that I think is beautiful and then it had this wonderful life and it means a lot to a lot of people.

You grow up skinny in Canada; in working-class Montreal, you're definitely the underdog.

The hockey I was raised on, the hockey I understand, the hockey that my dad taught me about when I was a boy was intrinsically connected with fighting. I grew up in a house where we revered tough guys.

If it were up to me, every job would be somewhere in Canada.

If you want to make god laugh, make a plan.

Before World War II in Canada, you were nobody until you went to England. Then, after that it was you're nobody until you went to the States.

It's something I want to do going forward - make a movie that is commercial and universal and will play in any movie theater or living room in the States or the UK, but is definitively Canadian. I don't think there's such a thing as prohibitively Canadian.

Montreal is a great town. There's equal parts blue-collar town.

For every big American movie I've done where I was the supporting guy, I've gone back home to Canada to do supporting movies where I was the lead.

I have a little sister, and I'm constantly annoyed [by] how terribly written most females are in most everything - and especially in comedy. Their anatomy seems to be the only defining aspect of their character, and I just find that untrustful and it straight-up offends me.

I am a proud Montrealer. Jobs will take me where they take me, but nothing will ever be able to convince me to leave my home.

There's a chunk of myself in every part I play.

My vanity and narcissism will never let me go too far.

I'd say that the No. 1 attribute you need as an actor is to be malleable. You need to be able to change and tailor what you're doing to what the situation dictates.

No one has a resume that they are 100% comfortable with, nor does anyone have a life that they are 100% comfortable with.

I just adore being on set. I adore storytelling. I can be on a set 70 hours a week and on those weekends, I'll still want to watch movies.

What I love about [TV] is this: It's a specific thing to be able to tell a satisfying, rewarding story in less than 25 minutes. Not everyone can pull that off. There's something really cool about giving lit people a bunch of little mini movies.

I know it's going to sound like a cliché, but the key of successful playing a role is to sort of keep it real and earnest and react the way that one would react in those situations. Where the disconnect between the movie and the audience would happen is if you go too big or too crazy with that stuff.

In the best-case scenario, the audience sees themselves in your shoes. The only way you can do that is if you try to play it as if it was happening to you.

My mom said to me when I was a little kid, "You don't have to hate your job. Just because you see all these unhappy grown-ups doesn't mean you have to be one of them." She said, "Find something that you would do for free and find a way to get paid to do it." That's been my guiding principle.

There's something about TV shows and the format that becomes a bit more personal. People watch two, three in a row before they get out of bed on their laptop or when they get home from going out and before they go to sleep. People make shows part of their daily routine, and that makes them take ownership of it. If you're so arrogant as to call yourself an artist, you can't ask for anything more than that.

I count absolutely no chickens before they're hatched. In fact, I assume they're all dead in their shells, inside their eggs.

When I started acting, my mom said, "If you want to go to film school and eventually direct, being on set is probably the best film school in the world." I'm incredibly grateful for the career I've had, but I was an actor to be a part of movies and TV, not the other way around.

What I do for a living and how I unwind are one and the same; it's a rare special thing.

Regardless of how insane it might be, when you dig somebody you just met and you send that first text, goddamn, it's an eternity before you get the reply back.

You always want to try and evolve an art form. It's not a very humble ambition; it reeks of arrogance. If you can, you want to try to do something that people haven't done before and give people something that they haven't seen.

People always like to have a good time and laugh, and, [among] the vast majority of the seven billion people on this earth, one thing that we all have in common is at some point we all need to pair up and find some sort of significant other, some sort of romantic counterpart.

At one time or another, everyone's had the rom-com itch that needs to be scratched.

I'm a chronic ad-libber. So whoever hires me, often to their chagrin, should know that I will be talking a bunch of smack.

I guess I always have sort of general ideas, but the best stuff would be the stuff that comes to you in the moment, always.

I don't work in movies and TV because I adore acting, it's because I adore movies and TV.

I would say that since I was nine years old I've always wanted to write and direct horror movies and action movies. There's never been a time in my life where that wasn't all I wanted to do.

I notice the older I get, the more my speaking voice turns people around. Even if they have no idea who I am, they know they've heard this weird nasal disaster somewhere before.