Amy Poehler

You have to care about how good you are and how good you feel, but not about how good people think you are or how good people think you look.

I just love bossy women. To me, bossy is not a pejorative term at all. It mans somebody’s passionate and engaged and ambitious and doesn’t mind leading.

[on Tina Fey] I like to say our relationship is as old as Lourdes Ciccone

Women talk about stuff on the way to the valet that it takes men 10 years to admit to each other. The depth at which women talk to and about each other is invaluable to me. With your really, really close good friends you do that fast.

The streets and woods around my house were a perfect setting for fake mischief. I would spend all afternoon pretending I had run away and had to live on my own. I would bring Toll House cookies and a sweatshirt and try to make a fire. I would sneak out side my house at dusk with a pair binoculars and search the streets for murderers. I created scenarios in my head that I always managed to escape from kidnap fantasies where I would wriggle free from the ropes.

I remember Tina Fey wrote a play about Catherine the Great f**king a horse and I thought, ‘That lady is hot stuff, I wanna know her.’

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

Progress is a new season and the rule of progress is everything in its season.

Know your goal, make a plan and pull the trigger.

Like an enemy I knew as intimately as any friend, I came to know the nagging, constant emptiness of the incongruent life. I ignored myself and lived for people, purposes, and goals that weren’t my own. I betrayed who I was and instead accepted a fictional substitute that was defined from the outside in.

Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

The way out of life and death is not some special technique; essential thing is to penetrate to the root of life and death.

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that make horseraces.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

This is your life and the clock is ticking.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.