You got to take a deep breath and give up. The system is rigged against you.

For me, comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, 'This crazy thing happened to me the other day.' And he's in front of 3000 people, and he's acting like an everyman, and he's getting paid so much money.

I like to joke about being gay because it's something teenagers would never joke about.

At once I feel that comedy is this amazing sort of transcendent thing, and I'm also open to the fact that maybe it's just an evolutionary hiccup, something that upright apes do in their free time.

I have a pretty good math mind, so I can see patterns, but I don't have a great ear. It's like a tragedy - I can see so much more natural musical ability in so many other people.

In high school, I worked eight hours a day just so I could get into the college of my dreams and say that I got in - and I never went.

My career was exploding at the same time that social media itself was expanding. But when my online videos were taking off, I didn't think, 'Oh, great! I'm going to be able to parlay this into a career!' I just wanted to be a comedian. I just wanted to perform live.

At the time of 'Words, Words, Words,' I'm a 19-year-old getting up feeling like he's entitled to do comedy and tell you what he thinks of the world, so that's inherently a little bit ridiculous.

I have a show on MTV called 'Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous.' I think that's a secret to a vast majority of America.

I just like to write and then perform.

You can give poor people this royal wedding to watch and make them feel good about themselves, or you can give them something useful like, I don't know... a toaster.

I really like The Beatles.

It feels like we're always juggling many pieces of information at once or trying out many personas at once. It makes life slightly nonlinear.

I'm bored way too easily. I'm staring at screens half the day. I need to be overstimulated. And how will that express itself artistically?

I was doing theater in my high school, and I started writing sort of silly songs on the piano backstage in summer theater. I eventually put them online and started getting this little following.

I fully embrace myself as a hypocrite.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.

I've always liked TV shows that have slightly unlikable leads, where you root for them in spite of a lot of things. I know it's not common with shows with young people; they have to be so likable. But, I mean, teenagers just generally aren't very likable. I know I wasn't as a teenager.

I think the comedy clubs tend to homogenize the acts a little bit, because they force them to be palatable in way too many environments.

I don't want you to think I'm better than people or that I know better than people.

I like the idea of conceiving a show and putting on a show, and especially when I got to the place where I could play theaters.

I'm clearly doing what I want. I hope kids can see my act and feel like they can be slightly more comfortable in their own skin because I'm being so ridiculously comfortable in mine. I'm not that comfortable in my skin the moment I walk offstage. But I try to project that while I'm on it.

I'm still a kid in his bedroom, writing songs and playing them.

Comedy doesn't really matter that much; I know that. I treat it like an adult - I don't treat it like a child or a god, which some people do. This might just be in America, but 'stand-up comedy' is something very particular that I don't particularly relate to.

If a comic is himself, there'll be things he can't do - because he has to adhere to that persona.

With 'Words, Words, Words,' that show was me experimenting with something, and then there was a clear direction for me.

I don't worship comedy; at the end of the day, I don't fall to the altar of comedy unquestioningly.

I've kind of stopped valuing laughter as the end-all measurement of what I'm doing.

I've come across people referring to themselves as 'Vine famous.' Some of them started out by putting up Vines just for fun, then all of a sudden they get a bunch of fans, and a week later their Vines are totally different. They become obsessed with how their videos will be perceived.

There's tons of dudes - like David O'Doherty, Tim Key, and Alex Horne - I made a lot of friends with people who are really incredible comics.

There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.