Trey Parker quotes:

Saying goodbye doesn't mean anything. It's the time we spent together that matters, not how we left it.

My first serious girlfriend, when I was 16, was Mormon. I went to her house for 'family home evening,' and I was like, 'Why aren't you people ignoring each other and watching television?'

If you ever go to Temple Square in Salt Lake City, if you stay there long enough, you'll see a homeless person standing in the middle of their nice, beautiful square, holding out a cup for change. And the Mormons don't ever ask him to leave.

A lot of people don't realize this, but probably the one person that gets made fun of in 'South Park' more than anybody is my dad. Stan's father, Randy - my dad's name is Randy - that's my drawing of my dad; that's me doing my dad's voice. That is just my dad. Even Stan's last name, Marsh, was my dad's stepfather's name.

What we're always looking for is weird social issues and weird connections to make. Luckily for them, there's no shortage of material.

Me and Matt love to argue, but in general our sense of humor is pretty much alike.

Colorado's right next to Utah - you know, Mormon Central.

No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'

I got into this little habit of architecture and building. I designed a house in Colorado and one in Hawaii. The idea is supposed to be build and sell - but then I can never bring myself to sell them.

You know that everyone thinks that in order to do South Park we must be wild, crazy, rock and roll stars. But the truth is we're just wholesome middle-American guys. We enjoy soda pop, baseball and beating up old people just as much as anybody.

If you're famous, you suck, just for being famous. People in England totally get that; Americans don't.

We made this really dumb decision to put on the cover nothing from South Park but just a real life photo of a piece of pooh dressed up like Mr. Hankey, and a lot of people didn't, they didn't even know what it was.

I grew up with the religion of 'Star Wars,' frankly. That's when I realized there is something bigger out there... and it's called The Force.

So we're considering doing a new Christmas album, because there's been Christmas episodes since then, and maybe finally do the version of 'The Most Offensive Song Ever' with lyrics intact.

It's not like we have a formula, but I think one of the reasons this show has survived is that it has a big heart at its center. Other cartoon shows have people crap on each other and make racist jokes. But I don't think people tune in for that. I just don't think a show lasts for 10 years without a heart.

When you're watching 'Armageddon,' and the Aerosmith song starts... Super funny.

All the religions are super funny to me.

It was exactly the same on the South Park movie really too. There's lots of violence in that too, but it always came down to anything sexual... They don't care about anything else.

People have a lot of different beliefs, and at the end of the day, we all have deeply held beliefs that probably don't make sense to anyone else.

We find just as many things to rip on the left as we do on the right. People on the far-left and the far-right are the same exact person to us.

I bought a house for my mom, I bought a house for my dad, I bought a house for my sister.

I've started confiding in people, other artists mostly, that I hate making 'South Park,' and I always have. It's super stressful. I'm always miserable.

The story of Jesus makes no sense to me. God sent his only son. Why could God only have one son and why would he have to die? It's just bad writing, really. And it's really terrible in about the second act.

I can feel myself dying inside.

Even from the very beginning, I didn't put any money in the stock market.

Any job is a job. If you have to be doing something, then you're probably not enjoying it.

It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great.

Like anything important, anything you need people to hear - you've got to have music for it. You've got to make it at least a little piece of a song or sometimes a whole song.

Even if you're not Christian, just from being in our culture you know Jesus and resurrection and redemption.

We're the guys who, if someone says you really shouldn't do an episode making fun of Scientologists, we say, 'Whatever.' Someone says, 'They might come try to burn your house down,' we say, 'We'll just get another one.'

If we have a great idea, we'll go, 'Oh, this could be a cool movie.' Or really for us, it's more like, 'Oh, this is a really bad idea. Let's do this. This seems really stupid.'

Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable.

I find Mormons adorable.

I think that parents only get so offended by television because they rely on it as a babysitter and the sole educator of their kids.

Bargaining makes you come up with the best ideas.

Love isn't a decision. It's a feeling. If we could decide who we loved,it would be much simpler, but much less magical

Careful?! Was my mother careful when she stabbed me in the heart with a coat hanger while I was still in womb?

My favorite musical? I don't. It changes all the time. I'm just a diehard, I'm totally old school, like I'll sit and watch, if they are re-doing Oklahoma in New York, I will be the first one there.

Hippies, hippies... they want to save the world but all they do is smoke pot and play frisbee!

I would let my kids watch this stuff way before I'd let them watch something like 'Full House' that I think would make them stupid.

In terms of the creative side of it, it's really been a thing where you come up with the funny stuff is usually at a bar or out talking to people or whatever.

It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great

The problem is we moved to LA... The only way to be punk rock in L.A. is to be a Republican.

I hate puppets so much.

I see Santa Claus and Joseph Smith and Luke Skywalker as the same person.

If somebody actually came to me and said, 'O.K., this is it: write your last 'South Park' episodes,' I'd be like, 'No, no, no.'

How many times have you been watching an episode of 'South Park' and thought, 'I'd like to be able to watch this on my television while hooked into my mobile device, which is being controlled by my tablet device which is hooked into my oven, all while sitting in the refrigerator?'

I have no desire to ever talk to Sean Penn.

There is nothing we can't do. So it's just the fact that we're doing topics like that that other people, especially network TV, won't touch, that we're satirists.

You know that everyone thinks that in order to do South Park we must be wild, crazy, rock and roll stars. But the truth is we're just wholesome middle-American guys. We enjoy soda pop, baseball and beating up old people just as much as anybody

Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.

I spend shockingly little time thinking about real-world stuff.

When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, 'The Dentist.' I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.

I was always a very happy, optimistic person.

The 'Beavis and Butt-head' movie was just a movie-length version of the TV show.

When you were a teenager in Colorado, the way to be a punk rocker was to rip on Reagan and Bush and what they were doing and talk about how everyone in Colorado's a redneck with a gun and all this stuff.

I was a big 'Charlie Brown' fan as a kid.

Out of all the ridiculous religion stories - which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous - the silliest one I've ever heard is, 'Yeah, there's this big, giant universe, and it's expanding, and it's all going to collapse on itself, and we're all just here, just 'cuz. Just 'cuz.' That to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.

That was a misconception among a lot of people - that Mormons are polygamist. No, they're not. I mean they obviously have that in their history, and there are some fundamentalists.

It's funny because I think a lot of it is simply... We've never considered ourselves satirists, but because we're on Comedy Central and because we're South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want.

You can't make experimental work by copying past work.

I've never met a Mormon I didn't like. They're really nice people. They're so Disney. They're so Rodgers and Hammerstein.

My fear is that, as soon as I get married and have kids that I'll kind of do what a lot of people do and suddenly start making, 'Now I'm gonna make films for kids.' I really hope I don't do that.

No show would be successful if you took a group of people and just said, 'You're dumb!' over and over. That's not what Broadway's about.

Doing a musical is like having a kid. It's out there alive somewhere. It's not like a movie or a TV show where what we intended is what everyone will see. The kid can act out. The kid's going to do what it wants to do.

A scotch buzz is the best buzz in the world.

Before the church responded, a lot of people would ask us, 'Are you afraid of what the church would say?' And Trey and I were like, 'They're going to be cool.' And they were like, 'No, they're not. There are going to be protests.' And we were like, 'Nope, they're going to be cool.' We weren't that surprised by the church's response. We had faith in them.

I don't want to say never, but I hope I don't become that 'take me seriously now' guy.

I find Mormons adorable. I love Disneyland and old musicals, and, to me, Mormonism fits right in with all of that.

I just realized that there are going to be a lot of painful times in life, so I better learn to deal with them in the right way.

I like to fancy myself more of a musician than anything else.

I love life...Yeah, I'm sad, but at the same time, I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like...It makes me feel alive, you know. It makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt something really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good. So I guess what I'm feeling is like a beautiful sadness.

I think people that have a brother or sister don't realize how lucky they are. Sure, they fight a lot, but to know that there's always somebody there, somebody that's family.

I try not to tune in to politics until it's two or three months before the election. Till then, it's like watching preseason football.

I would never kill somebody, unless they pissed me off.

It's all based on saying the shocking thing. We used to have a great time going to Hollywood parties and saying 'I think George Bush is doing a great job.' We'd clear out the room. I used to love it.

It's an Afghanistan goat, so it can't stay here, or else it'll choke on the sweet air of freedom.

It's been a fascinating thing because we didn't really know how to write when we started South Park at all. It's been like, we've just sort of grown up a bit and it's amazing to just see how, if you take Butters and Cartman and put them in any scene, it works.

I've learned that all a person has in life is family and friends. If you lose those, you have nothing, so friends are to be treasured more than anything else in the world.

Jerry Bruckheimer creates comedy, he just doesn't realize because he's a turd.

Living is having ups and downs and sharing them with friends.

My dad was just a big Joseph Campbell nut.

Once you have kids, you think like a parent. You get a lot more protective.

Sean Penn's really the only one stupid enough to put anything down on paper.

So much of what you see now in Hollywood is written and directed by committee, and you can see it.

The Republicans didn't want the government to run your life, because Jesus should. That was really part of their thing: less government, more Jesus. Now it's like, how about more government and Jesus?

The truth is, marijuana probably isn't going to make you kill people. Most likely isn't going to fund terrorists, but pot makes you feel fine with being bored and it's when you're bored that you should be learning a new skill or some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you're not good at anything.

There's a lot of people who, a cigarette is about the only vacation they have.

To me, every episode is like a song, and every season is like an album. There's that part of the day when you first get the idea and you say, "This could be really funny." And you sit down and you write it. There's just something that happens there that doesn't happen when you really give it a lot of time beforehand.

We created a brand for ourselves, so that now people can't get mad at what we do, because then they're just making of themselves.

Well I looked in my moms closet and saw what I was getting for Christmas, an ultravibe pleasure 2000.

When someone goes, 'Oh, this group is really pissed off at what you said,' there's not a piece of my body that goes, 'Sweet!' That means I did it wrong. I'm just trying to make people laugh.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

You don't need missionaries in Colorado; you got Colorado.

You know, and it really doesn't have a lot to do with the movie. That's the trick to doing a good musical is that, if you take that music number out, there's less to the movie there. You would miss it.