Tig Notaro quotes:

Basically I'm a female human being with brown hair, enjoy precision, reading the news, eating delicious food with my delicious friends and laughing at ridiculous things that don't translate while you are desperately trying to make them.

One of my favorite songs is 'Ghost' by Indigo Girls. Emily Saliers wrote that, and she is one of the most talented songwriters ever.

It's almost embarrassing how much support I have. I mean, I always tell people I feel like I'm perfectly set up to have cancer. I have great health insurance, I have a savings account. I have work lined up. I have friends and family. I have the best doctors I can get.

As a kid, I loved Paula Poundstone and Richard Pryor. But my mother was a huge influence on my comedy.

I didn't like to stop playing for a second to bother with eating or going to the bathroom. I was a really skinny kid, and I remember my mother always telling people, 'I don't know how she's alive. I think she gets all of her nutrients from air pollution.'

I was really into music. I started playing guitar also when I was nine. I wanted to be in the Beatles, even though John Lennon died the year I got a guitar and the Beatles broke up before I was born.

It was a free-for-all with music when I was growing up. My mother was a huge music fanatic so I was listening to everything from country to heavy metal to Indigo Girls to Elton John. I guess when I was really young I didn't like Willie Nelson, and she obviously loved him. Now I do too, I'm so thankful to her for playing his music nonstop.

A lot of times people will have after-parties or try and host an event for comedians, and they misunderstand us. They think it should be wild and crazy, or loud music, and comedians are typically pretty mellow people that just want to talk to each other. I think it would be highly unusual to find comedians who want to be at a loud, crowded party.

Not many people have had as much bad luck as I have, but not many people have had as much good luck, either.

I worked at restaurants and coffee shops and babysitting and just whatever I could do to make money.

My career has always kind of moved forward and upward. I've never had anything kind of stall out or go in the opposite direction. I've always kind of been moving in the right direction.

I was talking and playing pranks and skipping school, failing pretty much every class I took.

When I couldn't get ahold of cigarettes, I'd roll coffee grounds into typing paper and smoke that and then vomit.

I'm fascinated by caddy Buddhists popping up all over Hollywood and people that take themselves too seriously.

I am just at tragedy right now.

I can't believe I'm breathing and happy and thriving.

I talk about airplanes and things like that while my scars are on clear view.

My age makes all my wrinkles and gray hair make sense.

As soon as I say I'm from Texas people say, "Oh, I'm sure the school was horrible" and they picture me wearing some barrel and suspenders and people are bucktoothed and ignoring me. But that's not the case. I just had zero interest. I wanted to finish my research in the woods or play guitar or go have a cigarette.

I'm not a religious person; I'm not even, like, a spiritual person.

I love devastating movies, documentaries and hummingbirds (yes, in that order).

Everything's happened to me. Nothing can happen to me now.

I always wonder, aside from even my name, what if my parents never split up? What if my mother never died? It swirls in my head all the time.

I didn't have an interest in school at all and was getting in trouble all the time.

I didn't just want to be the one who was always looking around at the weird family members. I wanted to make my mistakes.

I didn't know what my fate was as far as being alive.

I didn't know whether I'd be attractive to anybody.

I really wanted to, but I just didn't understand how people became comedians. I kind of thought it was something you were born into. And so I wanted to be a veterinarian or an architect. I wanted to be in a band, and for some reason I could understand how you could be in a band because I had guitars and all my friends played music. Comedy was a secret want, but it wasn't anything I pursued.

I start crying when certain things come up, certain memories, certain feelings, and it's intense. But I think it's good for me - and therapeutic.

I think my brain just has a natural way of going to what would be the most insane thing, the least likely option.

I'm always going to do whatever I think is funniest. If something's dark, I'll do it. If it's a sock puppet, if it's a stool, I'll do it.

I'm now a pretty good mix of my mother and my stepfather because I'm in general pretty mellow. I'm not hyper-emotional. But there's also this side of me - my mother was an artist and very funny and a dancer and very wild and into fashion. My stepfather traveled a lot, and I kind of took on a role of parenting my mother a lot of times, because she was pretty hard to handle. A bit of a pistol.

I'm the luckiest unlucky person.

In movies, you just see somebody close their eyes, and you go on to the next scene.

In standup, you don't have anything near you except a microphone.

It's not the child's responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It's the parent's responsibility to learn who the child is.

Life can very genuinely and realistically pile things on. It doesn't dole out the heartache and pain, or joy, perfectly.

There's something a lot more self-conscious feeling when there's cameras coming in for close-ups. It makes you very aware.

When anything huge happens to me, I always think, this isn't my moment, this is a moment.

When I announced I had cancer on stage, it was my brain leaping to that insane moment of, "There's no way I could start a show saying, 'Hi, I have cancer!'" And also for me to have these scars, and then think, "Oh my gosh, what if I did stand-up and not even acknowledge that my shirt was off, or that I have scars.

When I got sick, it threw everything off course.