My dad was a masculine, big, hairy guy who was good with tools and stuff, but he wasn’t a blustery, alpha asshole.

I can remember him looking at a Cosmopolitan magazine while we were at the supermarket and saying to me, “You know that’s all bullshit, right? Women grow hair out of their armpits, and that’s fine. I don’t know why they make ’em spend all this money.”

So he would talk about the natural beauty of women without ever sitting me down, and saying: “Listen up, son . . .”

My mom taught me to work very hard and keep your heart wide open no matter how badly other people might treat it.

Courage on stage is courage with a lowercase c.

When you heckle me on Twitter, I don’t care, you’re less annoying than a mosquito. If you heckle me onstage, you’re the enemy, and I’ll make a real effort to make you wish that you hadn’t opened your mouth.

What did I learn from the experience of being in London? It’s great to live in a city that’s been around for a long time.

This city has existed for roughly two thousand years, and when it’s around that long, certain things just hum when they’re very elegantly run. Public transportation here is out of this world compared to Los Angeles. Parks for kids have fences around them. In L.A. they put parks next to a freeway. Go get hit by a car. It’s not because people are smarter in London. It’s just that between 1450 and 1785, there were 1,315 kids who got run over by horses because they didn’t have a fence around the park. So they figured: Let’s put up a fence. In L.A., they’ll figure that out in a hundred years.

I love jokes that have sadness in them because if you pull back like a slingshot, the audience feels a sad, “Oh God,” and it’s so much sweeter and funnier when the rubber band is let go and the audience flies into that other emotion that the comedian wants it to feel.

My kids teach me how to be a good dad, because they’re so young. If you don’t parent well, they die, because they don’t know how to take care of themselves.

It’s been really wonderful to discover that the cliché about British food not being good is, at minimum, twenty years old. The food here is amazing. A lot of it is fresher than it is in the States — like bread and eggs.

In the UK, you don’t have to refrigerate your eggs. When I first saw this, I said: “You’re all going to get salmonella and die.” And I was told, “No, you poison your eggs in the United States.”

It seems the only reason we have to refrigerate them in the United States is because in the United States, when an egg comes out of a chicken’s asshole, I think, they put it in a bleach wash that ruins the shell’s protective covering, thereby necessitating refrigeration. In England, they don’t do that, so the eggshell protects your egg and you don’t have to refrigerate it.

If I could have eggs with anybody? Gautama, the Buddha. Would he eat eggs? Hey, I heard a funny anecdote about the Dalai Lama. I don’t know if it’s true. But apparently somebody was telling him, “Oh, here you are, amazing, vegan, blah, blah, blah,” and he was like, “Can I get a steak?”

Maybe the Buddha, being enlightened, doesn’t need to eat. But he’d be the single human person I would most want to meet and figure out how to get out of the prison of my needs, wants, urges, libido, selfishness, and all that stuff.

The older I get and the more stuff I do, the less I think in terms of risk.

It might not work out, but then that might not have been the goal.

For example, with the show Catastrophe, I got the opportunity to write a script. That’s all it was at first — a pilot script deal. So I really tried not to think in terms of risk.

When I produced my own stand-up special, I said I was going to produce it with an amount of money that I could afford to lose. I wound up making my money back by many multiples, thank goodness, which was amazing, but going in I had to be thinking: I am absolutely prepared to throw this money in the trash.

What has drinking taught me? Christ. It’s taught me that I’ve done enough of it. My quota has been met.

Drinking also taught me that putting chemicals in your body and drugs feels really, really, really good. But it feels good too fast, and if you want to feel that good, it’s best that you get to that sort of peak more slowly.

You shouldn’t take an elevator or a rocket to that type of feeling. You have to take the stairs, that is, work very hard on a relationship over years or put all of yourself into a creative project.

So I totally understand why people want to get fucked up. I know why I did. I want to feel very good still, but I know that I have to get there via the scenic route.

Nothing touches a grapefruit for bitter-sweetness.

It’s more important to be happy than it is to be right. I struggle with that, because I love to be right.

My wife has taught me that just being in the same place together is so important. I don’t have to necessarily be engaged in a deep philosophical discussion, we can just be sitting on the same couch, or be in the same bed, or holding hands walking down the street.

If out of the blue I smelled the Giambotta pizza from Pizzeria Regina in the North End of Boston, I would start crying because I love it so much.

It’s just a good, thin-crust pizza made in a brick oven by people who have been doing it for fifty years or so. There’s not necessarily TLC in it because the guy’s just makin’ pizza for another schmuck — me. But they’ve been doing it for so long they can’t help but be excellent at it, you know?

I love to do shows that are really hard because you have to get better at comedy.

I was doing stand-up for years, but for very little money, and few people were coming. But with Twitter, people share your stuff. Twitter allowed me to sell tickets on the road.

Poise is having it together with a modicum of elegance. In other words, poise is something I don’t have.

Being married means that I don’t put myself in harm’s way, as it were, with a human woman that for some reason would want to have sex with me.

I don’t put sugar on my grapefruit. Not that it’s not a good taste. It is. But I like grapefruit raw . . . because it’s not a 100 percent good taste. There’s that bitterness, and it’s so strong. You know that whatever’s happening with the enzymes inside of you, it’s probably good.

Orange juice is nice, but orange juice is, “Hmmm . . .” Grapefruit juice is, “Boom, let’s get to work.”

I abhor violence. I think it’s an expression of weakness. But I also do have ideals that I would die for.

I’m very lucky in a sense because I got sober thirteen years ago and then twelve years ago began to deal with serious depression for which I had to get treatment.

So I came close to death a couple times due to things that were happening inside my own skull. I kind of carted my own worst enemy around with me and it made me not really afraid of things in the outside world.

You know, like being in a bad car accident. I’ve been in a bad car accident. What happens? You have surgery, it could take a while, you could be in a wheelchair forever, maybe certain things don’t work anymore. But what are you gonna do?

There’s titanium in my right forearm. If I bang it on something? Whoa! I mean, blinding, unbelievable pain. It hurts to do pushups. I do them anyway.

I’m not afraid to go onstage, but that’s only because I’ve had the good fortune to have gone through the stuff I mentioned earlier.

What are they gonna do? Boo? Tell me I suck? Believe me, I’m gonna survive that, and have.

You can’t tell that I’m scared even if I am.

It may be an established scientific fact that girls are more mature emotionally and otherwise than boys of the same age.

In high school, girls tried to show me a road map for telling the truth and getting out how you’re feeling. Girls and women are better at talking back and forth with each other, triangulating, figuring out how they really feel and how something’s affected them. Whereas men just say: This is it. Lock it up and throw away the key.

And that isn’t the best way.

My wife will bring me a problem and I’ll want to immediately put a bullet in its head. But she’ll want to inhabit the problem more and map its edges to figure out how to substantially solve it.

That’s why I think the male-female relationship is a good thing, because you can really help each other. The ideal person might be sort of a combination.

Girlfriends in high school — woe unto them — tried to help me feel my emotions as they were happening rather than three weeks later when I was drunk and smashing a window because I didn’t understand what was transpiring inside of my own fucking ribcage.

They did their best, and if any of them are reading this: Sorry that I didn’t even begin to learn those lessons until a good twenty years later, if then . . .

I don’t normally perform stand-up for children, but there’s a regular show in London, and a lot of comics here do it.

I did a really bad job. The kids were like, “Wow, you suck. How unfortunate that my mommy and daddy brought me.”

My wife’s mom came with my four-year-old son — which I thought would be great. You know, he’d see what his dad does. But he thought it was weird. What? Why is my daddy catering to other people’s enjoyment? Why is he trying to make them laugh? He’s always wanting to make me laugh!

He almost had a psychotic break. He actually ran up to the stage, and my mother-in-law had to grab him. Afterward, she said: “I’m so sorry!”

And I was, like, “Please. I’m so glad that he ran up to the stage. That was the only time anyone laughed.”

For more wisdom and life lessons from world leaders, cultural icons, and athletes, head to Esquire.com.

Watch Rob Delaney in Catastrophe, starting June 19 on Amazon. To buy his book, Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage., head here.