Tina Fey

You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to f**k it.

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.

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.

When I was going to school in, like, ’84 to ’88, you didn’t have cell phones. There was no e-mail, if you can wrap your brain around that.

In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.

A coworker at SNL dropped an angry c-bomb on me and i had the weirdest reaction. To my surprise, I blurted, ‘No. You don’t get to call me that. My parents love me. I’m not some Adult Child of an Alcoholic that’s going to take that shit.’

I was rapping as a hobby. It was something I did for my friends and just played around on ideas and stuff like that.

[On her most dreadful crush] I used to drive, pretty pathetically, I’d just drive by their house all the time and they didn’t know who I was. I’d just drive by the house all the time. I once knocked on the window and I thought, “What am I doing? What am I going to say if they come to the door and don’t know who I am?”

I hope we left you with something to put under your pillow.

Macho does not prove mucho.

Since I started acting it’s kind of been a bit mad. I never really did anything before and two years ago I started acting and I’ve kind of been in work ever since. Then Harry Potter came along and it’s been a huge step and a massive event in my life.

I don’t like a tremendous amount of conflict. I don’t think that fighting and passion are the same thing.

It’s when someone has an agenda of their own for the record that it doesn’t work for me.

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 see two or three cars that are really good, but they’re not dominant. There’s usually somebody who’s got one that’s a little bit better than everybody.

I don’t believe in perfection. I don’t think there is such a thing. But the energy of wanting things to be great is a perfectionist energy.

It’s a lot harder to do an ensemble because your energy is going in so many different places, and you have to cover everybody. You have to sort of split your attention.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

[on getting the part of Cedric] I knew the casting director from another movie which I did, and they wanted to see me for this part, but I was doing another movie over the casting period, so I ended up seeing Mike Newell and Mary Selway and Fiona Weir – who were casting at the time – before anyone else was seen for casting. And then, I went to do this other movie, and then the day I came back… I got a call back and basically, that’s what happened.

Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.

There wasn’t much sex and drugs… well, there wasn’t much drugs!