Tina Fey

Confidence is 10% work and 90% delusion.

Somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. Essentially, I was just trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity.

Yeah, it’s tough being smart and sexy, too. I have to say, I’m really not that attractive. Until I met my husband, I could not get a date. I promise you it’s true. My husband Jeff Richmond saw a diamond in the rough and took me in.

I like to delude myself that I’m in the old-Hollywood mode. I just tailor my clothes well and try to keep my skin clear. While it would be great to work out an hour a day, there is something inherently sort of selfish about it. I can’t do it.

When humor works, it works because it’s clarifying what people already feel. It has to come from someplace real.

Because we were raised around art and went to museums and the women I grew up around were curvy…there wasn’t this value on skinny, skinny, skinny. Curvy was clearly meant to be the winner. I go up and down a few pounds with a relative amount of kindness to myself. And I have a daughter, and I don’t want her to waste her time on all of that.

God gave us a penis and a brain, but not enough blood to use both at once.

[On working with Woody Allen] That was a very surreal experience: I had studied the script right down to the punctuation marks, and then he would say ‘we’re not going to say what’s on the page, and you don’t really have to either, try to keep up.’

It’s an idiotic thing that you have to be a college graduate to be an agent.

I think if you ask any of us here, we all dreamed of ending up on Saturday Night Live. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll just keep doing this as long as I can get away with it.’

I feel like I represent normalcy in some way.

If it’s bad dialogue then I would think of nothing worse than the camera lingering on me and the person I’m talking to for fifteen minutes.

If I go and try to watch a movie by myself I’ll be completely transfixed the whole time, concentrating one hundred percent. But if I’m with another person on a date or something, within two minutes I’ll be like ‘This is rubbish, this is rubbish. We should leave and do something else.’ I don’t really know why.

Anything where we’re the butt of the joke, no one tells us about it.

I think London’s sexy because it’s so full of eccentrics.

I’m really afraid of getting hit by cars, like terrified of it. I’m terrified of crossing streets. I’m also very accident-prone…I think people aim for me.

I’ve always wanted to play Maria in West Side Story. My idol is Natalie Wood, and I love the movie, so I think a modern-day twist on it would be really neat.

It’s just such a tangled-up issue, the way women present themselves [in comedy]-whether or not they choose to put their thumbs in their panties on the cover of Maxim and judge each other back and forth on it. It’s a complicated issue, and we didn’t go much further on saying anything other than to say, ‘Yeah, it’s a complicated issue and we’re all kind of figuring it out as we go.’

Well I had my kids so young that I kind of feel that I’m a kid too and am growing up with them. The things they’re interested in tend to really influence me.

I think it’s important to be flexible and free, and you can’t be free and spontaneous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If people don’t like me for whatever I do, for being me, then that’s too bad. I don’t want to change to be something that I’m not for other people to like me.