Tina Fey

There are no mistakes, only opportunities.

My favorite day at ’30 Rock’ is Thursday when the show airs. At lunch, we screen the episodes. For everyone to watch together, to see the stuff we all worked on, to hear the crew laugh – it’s great fun.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open. The crowd cheers.

I really wasn’t heavy in high school. But no one feels right in their own skin, particularly in high school.

You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.

Trying to be a leader in a sort of very atypical workplace like ‘Saturday Night Live’ forces you to realize that no one wants you to be their leader. If you can help them get their thing on TV or whatever, they want that. But no adult is looking for a role model.

I actually love the audition process, so I’m so happy to fight for things. I would love to read something that I want to fight for, but lately the scripts are not that compelling.

There aren’t any hard women, only soft men.

A band’s only unique thing is its chemistry, especially if none of you are prodigious players or particularly handsome. The one thing you have is your uniqueness, so we hold on to that.

There are some people in here who are not journalists. There’s a masseuse in here who’s not a journalist – I think that’s ever so exciting.

An awful lot of gay pop stars pretend to be straight. I’m going to start a movement of straight pop stars pretending to be gay.

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

My love for the band is still there. It hasn’t changed, maybe that’s why it’s so painful these days.

Well, I haven’t actually died “live” yet but I’ve been dead a few times. It’s strange, but it’s quite sort of relaxing. You feel like a bit of a therapist, because everyone’s giving you all their grief, and you’re just lying there listening. Yeah, it was quite nice, like no pressure after a couple weeks. I enjoyed it.

This Velvet Mafia thing is just another homophobic, nasty kind of thing that jealous queens make up.

The day before the film (Harry Potter) was released, I was just sitting in Leicester Square, happily being ignored by everyone. Then suddenly strangers are screaming your name. Amazing.

For my first show at ‘SNL’, I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn’t getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, ‘Okay, that happened, and I did not die.’ You’ve got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.

It was fun to sing somebody else’s song.

I’ve signed breasts and bums. I’ve signed everything!

If I could trade places with anyone in the world it would be with someone who has lots of power like George Bush.

I realized what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our first U.S. tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn’t want to go on!