Tina Fey

To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.

When I started on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I had the choice of wearing contact lenses, which I had never worn before, or glasses, in order to be able to read the cue cards.

Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don’t know who that’s attributed to. I think it’s Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.

If you ever start to feel too good about yourself, they have this thing called the Internet, and you can find a lot of people there who don’t like you.

I would say that one of your greatest accomplishments, Amy Poehler, is that you have so successfully used your art and comedy as a source of positivity in the world, by creating Smart Girls [an online community for girls, encouraging them to be their authentic selves], by making [Leslie in] Parks and Rec not only a positive feminist character but creating a good-hearted worldview within that program.

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.

My passion is doing movies, and as long as I keep doing that, I’ll be happy. I want to do movies, fun roles and dramatic ones. I love all of it.

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

When you get a chance to step back, you notice all these great things you’ve done and all these great people that you’ve worked with.

I guess I was a floater, but not really. I don’t know. I didn’t get high school.

To me the biggest irony of this lifetime that I’m living is that for someone who thrives in the public eye in the creative ways that I do, I actually don’t enjoy being in the public eye.

The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.

When you are writing a script, you can’t help but stop and daydream about which actors are going to play the parts, and I kind of imagined Natalie Portman. Not just because she is beautiful, because obviously she is, but she is a wonderful actress who hasn’t had a chance in a long time to show the world how talented she is.

But I love to entertain. My vocation is to accrue all these experiences, to write about them, to get them out of my system, to not get sick, and then to share them publicly.

I’m just a big, hard tool.

I think an extreme thing; I adjust it, I adjust it, I adjust it. That’s the way I get to it, but I have to push to, you know, the furthest concept possible.

That said, my kids are at home right now with my husband and I’m missing something important at my daughter’s school which makes me feel sick inside. It’s a lot of balance and a lot of really hard decision making.

[On taking a pay cut to make a documentary] I could keep trying to do the same kind of comedies. You know how it’s going to go, and you can get an audience with it, but then I feel like a hamster on a wheel.

It would be great to see somebody like Kid Rock kissing a man. But I’m sure that he wouldn’t like the prospect of it put to him, and I won’t even go there with Eminem.

They put all this money into these huge movies, and then no one goes to see them… That sort of shows that they’re out of touch. Then, everyone in town passes on my little movie, and it does really well.

I have a suspicion that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to f*** [sleep with her] anymore.