Tina Fey

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.

I don’t enjoy any kind of danger or volatility. I don’t have that kind of ‘I love the bad guys’ thing. No, no thank you. I like nice people.

Please welcome the woman I have been assigned to mentor – Lindsay Lohan.

An interim government was set up in Afghanistan. It included two women, one of whom was Minister of Women’s Affairs. Man, who’d she have to show her ankles to to get that job?

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.

Because we were raised around art and went to museums and the women I grew up around were curvy…there wasn’t this value on skinny, skinny, skinny. Curvy was clearly meant to be the winner. I go up and down a few pounds with a relative amount of kindness to myself. And I have a daughter, and I don’t want her to waste her time on all of that.

His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.

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

I don’t know if it was much of an interview. We just shot the breeze.

Well, for the My Generation album, there was nothing to be nervous about in them days. We used to take every day as it came. Every day was just a gig and I think we did the recording between gigs literally.

I have standards I don’t plan on lowering for anybody, including myself.

Everyone has an idea that they think would be a great movie. Everyone has a cousin who they think you should work with. Everyone has a warped vision of Hollywood and what success in Hollywood is like. That you love cocaine and that you spend every night in orgies with models. If only it were true.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

I promise you, you’re going to see a new Ye. You’re going to feel the impact of the new relationships and the new ideas and the exposure that I’ve gathered. It’s about to be applied now.

You don’t even realize how much you need Internet, but it really stops you from doing a lot.

The only way I could get comfortable around people was to make them laugh. I was an obedient girl, and humor was my one form of rebellion.

Politics: ‘Poli’a Latin word meaning ‘many’; and “tics” meaning ‘bloodsucking creatures’.

The most romantic thing, a lovely boy bought me a dress once. He got my measurements, actually they were from “The Notebook” and I had them sitting somewhere, and he found them and bought me this dress, tailor-made, this beautiful little black cocktail dress. And I thought that was very, very classy.

I was bored one day so my Dad took me to this acting school. I liked it more than having fun – I liked it for a job.

I’ve been working so hard, I’m about to have a Mariah Carey.

Fame for fame’s sake is a completely empty experience. Fame should be a by-product (and not necessarily a good one) of achieving something extraordinary.