Tina Fey

We’re all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn’t let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn’t let us watch ‘The Flintstones’ if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of ‘The Honeymooners’. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old ‘Honeymooners’.

You don’t just decide to destroy a person by making up stuff, and no one at ‘SNL’ is writing to go after someone.

I got a fan letter on the back of a prison menu. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, they get pie. It’s not so bad. They get pie on the weekends.’ I want to say blueberry and also a Boston cream pie. Not so bad.

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

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

How do you expect me to see your nasty-looking eye ball if you don’t look straight ahead?

What was the competition? Well, I remember this Puerto Rican who came out in a short skirt and a gun.

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

Guys act strange around me. I swear I don’t know why!

[on Edward Cullen in ‘Twilight’] He’s a poet, and very deep and profound. He’s just extraordinarily troubled.

I’m pleased with how ridiculous I am. I like me. Though I’m not a huge fan. I know when to switch me off.

You don’t waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

Congress is like jazz – it’s really about the bills it’s not passing. It’s also like jazz in that most people hate it and anyone who says they don’t are lying.

[On drum machines] Fantastic to write with. They have their place, they’re terribly useful to the musician, but they’re just another tool. They never will replace a good drummer. A lot of the bands that use them, I call them typewriter bands because basically they program the sample sounds with no real dynamics, and that dynamics is very important. And the records come out sounding very flat and very 2-dimensional whereas something with real dynamics and a good drummer can add another dimension – depth – to the band and that’s why bands that play together when they’re actually making the record will always sound better.

I’m quite obviously not the world’s most handsome man – I’m the second world’s most handsome man!

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

I didn’t get on TV until I was 30, which is really fortunate because you are who you are at that point.

[about political pundits suggesting Trump be given a chance to be president] Now, in the broadest sense, I get that impulse: hope for the best in the face of very long odds. It’s like we’re on a plane and we just found out our pilot is a wombat.

What cha saying boy, you think Im playing boy, watch ya mouth girl, its a mans world.

I’m not always the first person to run out and see something I’m in. I don’t know; for me, that’s not why I did it. I did it because I wanted to act. I don’t really think about the end result. I don’t feel like I have to see it – for me, it already happened.

You can sometimes get your own feelings across more strongly if you pretend that you’re singing it from someone else’s angle. But it’s always from me. It’s just a new way of framing it.