Jenny Slate Quotes

TV can be fairly rigid. I've done enough Network TV to know that it's fun but if I have to go somewhere every day maybe it's not the most satisfying [job].

I tend to watch things that aren't really the genre of my own work.

A lot of people think that I'm one of the women from 'Broad City' - and I'm just not.

Don't use a pick-up line.

I am a plant and I have a fragile green stem and my flower is still in the pod on the top of the stalk, unopened, when the dawn strolls in over the horizon. My blossom spreads out during the day and it goes into the pod at night and then it goes again the next day and all of the days.

I was born bucking the idea that I should have to be anywhere that I don't like or talk to people who make me feel dead or trapped.

There's so much interference, so much static and people's voices talking about what you do and why you do it that I've learned to be like, 'No, no.' It's actually simple. I just do this.

I don't have any horror stories of trying to start as a comedian and eating it constantly on stage.

It's 2014, and the fact that anybody has to fight for the right to do what they want to do with their body in a safe and responsible way is infuriating.

I think of my gender as a part of my complex humanity.

I guess some people want to be performers because they want to be famous.

It's exciting to play someone who is a bit tougher than I am. I liked feeling those adjustments.

If I'm going to have baked goods in the morning, the rule is that I have to make them myself.

I've only been acting since 2009 and I learn more and more with each job. I think I prepare and I'm very focused and I have a good work ethic that I learned in school.

I have things I say over and over again, for sure, but I've never wanted to make an album or really go on the road. I don't want any traction. I just want to be able to express myself and to feel love.

I know sometimes my Twitter feed is intense, but I take it as a friendly void to scream into. I don't have another way to be.

Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice). Give in. Fall apart. Look at the pieces. Reassemble. This is the essential movement of my holy flux.

I do think that character types trend. As a female comedian, the parts that come my way are often terrible women.

But back to the sea captain and his broken heart. I somehow always felt that this was my story as well. Maybe because I was so obsessed with what it would feel like to one day fall in love, to have another person who loved you the most, and loved you so much, voluntarily, that it became involuntary.

I am supposed to be touched. I can't wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

We love rom-coms, but it's getting to where we don't identify with any of the women in them.

I'm tired of someone being called 'quirky' because they tripped or got a stain on their shirt. It's like a beautiful blonde lady who's quirky because she has bedhead, or she's quirky because she sometimes says the wrong, cute thing. I like it when women are quirky as human beings.

I have wondered on many occasions if any confidence I have is just a weird side effect of foolishness and I live under the weight of so much embarrassment, I'm surprised the top of my head isn't flat.

I really like working. I can't think of a job I didn't like. I was in an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, which is not my idea of folk art; but I really enjoyed making it, and everyone was really nice.

The women were new friends but I loved them in a massive way. The love was like a large trove of devotion that could only be amassed over time, but it had arrived all at once. The way I loved them felt like it was from long ago.

There was a while when I got really bad stage fright and I basically felt ... I was incredibly angry. I felt like everything had been taken away from me and it was at that point that I realized how much doing stand up reminds me of my self love and curiosity about myself and love of other people because I don't go on stage to dominate.

I have no regrets. The best thing to happen to me was for Lorne Michaels to hire me and fire me.

There's a whole thing now in the entertainment industry that's like, 'You need to write for yourself. Those are the people that are really valuable.' And it's just like, 'I don't want to! I just want to act!'

I think I've come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am.

You're always putting yourself into your work. There's no separation; it's just how you use yourself and transform.

I tend to be really spacey, but I don't think it's because I'm unintelligent - it's just my imagination and a little bit of ADD.

I learned that I was able to focus. I've always thought of myself as somebody who is like either it's there or it isn't there. I really worked at this, and I focused, and I was able to replace self-doubt with focus. That was something new for me to say self-doubt is there, but it does not need to be in the front row. You can ask it to take a back seat and replace that front row seat with focus.

As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.

I couldn't wait to be an adult woman, and I'm glad I felt that way as a kid because, when I grew up, I realised I live in a world where the female form is really disrespected, and society is often trying to wrestle the female form into a shape that looks more like a young boy.

I'm not one to wallow, but I am one to feel the sting of a slap for a while, I think.

I'm competitive and I have a messy purse, but otherwise, I like people to think I'm a winner.

You are not waiting for your life to start. It's going on right now.

I would go so far as to say I would not have the life that I have right now if it wasn't for Gabe Liedman. He is the first person I met in my adulthood that I felt was truly delighted by me and understood me and also was curious about me.

even when I am happy, it sometimes happens that the slightest things can tip me into nonspecific sadness when I am alone.

Life has been so discouraging that I have forgotten why and how to fantasize, and I feel weak.

'Obvious Child,' the short, had a nice life online and a great festival run, but the short and the feature still stand apart from everything else I've done. I play a woman who you might meet in life. My other work is much more heightened.

I like dressing like I'm going on a date when I'm on stage.

Comedy can be a little brutal, but not in a satisfying way.

It occurs to me, even as I'm not sure what's left of me, that I can use what is still alive to really behave in a way that I admire.

Each time I fall in love I feel fear that the world won't let me be in the world with it, that I either have to pick the world or the love.

I really like to cook and have dinner parties and I like to clean, it really clears my head and it makes me feel good to keep my home as a comfortable place.

The super-ego is reiterative. It repeats the most boring, pointy, hurtful things, and if you met it at a party, if it were a person, you would think that the person was not only mean and insane, but also not as smart as they think they are. You wouldn't listen. You would think they were a shithead.

I want to keep growing and I want to be an actress for as long as I can.

And even though my head was on backwards and my brain felt, you know, not at its best, I was still aware that two very bad choices were being shoved at me: Tell him that he's right or at least on the right track and therefore lie and also abandon myself and cause more damage by letting his ignorance and monologue go on forever, or tell him NO, he is not even close to correct, that the fact that he is pontificating and instructing and not actually conversing is a sign that he does not even remotely understand. But then after saying that I would have to weather the storm of his humiliation and frustration, and somehow end up feeling bad about myself, like I should have been gentler and treated him like a child who simply doesn't know any better.

I just left wishing that it was longer because I enjoyed it so thoroughly.

You don't realize it until you go out and take a look, but there are so many ways in which sexism is just allowed in our culture, not just in the entertainment industry. It's just allowed to be there, and that's not acceptable anymore. And I think it's really important to be very vocal.

I have a big thing about needing to know that I belong - in my group of friends, in my family, in my industry.

A lot of times what's satisfying to me in comedy is when a woman successfully does self-care.

My baseline function is I'm usually really happy and optimistic. I think I really genuinely like being alive, and I've got a spring in my step - that's what I've been like all my life.

I fidget and change my outfit a lot. It's really a way of keeping myself comfortable.

Sometimes do you ever get jealous of the plants, that they only have to grow and not know about it, and they don't take anything personally?

There's not one type of stand-up, just like there's not one type of woman.

I hope that the restaurant I go to will have buffalo chicken fingers. I hope that one day I can work with Matt Damon. I have big and little dreams, and they're all equally important to me. A life without buffalo chicken fingers, I don't know if I would want that life. Even if it meant I got to work with Matt Damon. Everything has its worth.

I think, from a really early age, I just wanted to be an actress. And I ended up doing comedy because it was the thing that kind of, like, came out of my nature the most easily. But, I've always wanted to do as many different kinds of performances - whatever I could.

For some reason, I never watched Lifetime but just discovered it. I was like, 'Oh, it's all rom-coms!'

Your feelings of joy are not fake if you are having them! You are allowed to feel joy about sitting on the lap of a dog in a dream, and taking a ride in a van with open windows and sharing a seatbelt. God dammit, this is a gift from your fucking soul! Self-generate, don't you see? Break the trap break the trap break the trap leave the trench!

A psychic recently looked right into the eternal cosmos and then returned to me with this elegant yet cryptic message: Grow up.

Sometimes you watch comedians and feel like they're jerking off in front of you, but they want you to see how big it is.

I think, in general, finding the right time to have a baby is pretty scary.

I loved pretending to be a middle-aged Jewish woman. I just wanted to do what I saw Gilda Radner and Carol Burnett doing. But I'm not a particularly good impressionist. It was never my strong suit.

For a while I would have trench-times, when everything felt like blank paper, and I couldn't feel anyone's heart pointed even in my direction, let alone anyone loving me or wanting me to be around. Very boring, very lonely, very tired, again. It was hard to feel anything except "I am not one of the creatures who will experience anything precious.

I've always wanted to play a normal woman, and I think I have been offered these parts where I play a kook because I'm not the idea of what a normal woman is.

I think that, unfortunately, people who are maybe threatened by feminism think that it's about setting your bra on fire and being aggressive, and I think that's really wrong and really dangerous.

If you make a careless choice, you can really ruin things and it can take awhile for them to repair.

I think sometimes in comedy the characters are often sacrificed for the joke, and it's more important for it to be funny than for there to be love.

I had some friends that went to this hypnotist to stop smoking, and I kind of love things that seem magical. And I liked that it was in Santa Monica, and I had to go near the ocean to get my brain washed out or whatever. So I went there. And I went on a Thursday, and I got hypnotized.

You have to be really careful to watch out for the difference between banding together, and being grouped together by people who don't understand you.

I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can't add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps

If I'm not the best aunt in America, then I don't know what's going on.

They were part of a forest, an ecosystem that is perfect because of its wide variety of species, dominant because nothing is not allowed to be there. In the forest, everything that is inclined to thrive really does, and has a job, and some jobs are to grow things up and some jobs are to take things apart and everything is accepted because there is no notion - among bacteria and moss and busy mice - there is no notion of who deserves to do something or be in a place. There are only lives to be lived, and they are everywhere.

I think my friends would say I'm pretty goal-focused but whimsical.

Don't think twice. If it's a character that you feel compelled to play and story that you feel needs to be told, don't think twice.

I think it's important to not just speak to like-minded people.

It's important to say that it's not just men that can be man-children. Women can be grown-up women and still have the playfulness of people who are younger.

Women love to be asked more about their clothes than their work. We're dolls; we made a wish to become alive.

People say that the best part about doing animation is that you don't have to dress up to go to work, but I don't believe that. I dress up to go to work. I dress up for an airplane. I think it's just focusing your skillset, focusing on your voice and the comedy.

I'm usually a fairly harsh critic. It depends. I tend to really not watch my work, because I just feel uncomfortable, and I can be highly critical.

I feel I have to be totally cemented in my position, all: 'You can't tell me what to do with my body', but there is another part of me that is, you know, myself: vulnerable, with lots of doubts.

I always thought that farts were funny, and I always thought that they were mine to talk about because they came out of my body.

I learned my lesson early in my career that it's not helpful to go and look at what other people's opinions are.

That was something that I learned: It's actually okay if the way that I do my best is when I'm treated well.

Using creative expression as a means to a professional end makes me curl up a bit.

It looks like I'm just gonna keep getting really, really happy and sad and embarrassed and excited and disappointed for the rest of my life, so let's just do that.

So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don't have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one

There are so many things I'd like to do. I'd really like to be in a period piece that takes place in old New York or old Hollywood and wear those costumes and that makeup.

I don't like taking physical risks at all. I take a lot of emotional risks, and I don't feel like I need to get on a bike or a horse or jump off of anything ever.

I'd like to be in a female version of The Fugitive. Something where I don't have to be ripped up like an action star, but be a normal, healthy lady who is framed and on the run. I'd have to run from explosions and punch people in the face but not rappel down a building.

I'm stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet - what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people's mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.

Not often is there as much of a vulnerable side as there is a funny side.

I spend so much time hoping things for myself.

I sometimes think my earnestness is confused for stupidity, but it shouldn't be.

It's not good for me to see things while they're being edited. I can be highly critical, so I try to stay away.

It makes a lot of sense to me that I would be a cartoon. I feel like a cartoon as a person. I really, really do.

I've called myself an accidental activist because I came to it not on purpose.

I want to write a studio movie, but probably one that's for me to be in.