Tina Fey Quotes

Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You" was constantly on my FM Walkman radio around that time. I think that made me cry because I associated it with absolutely no one.

For most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us, unless you believe in evolution. Actually, I take it back. The whole thing is a disaster.

My problem with the traditional acting method was that I never understood what you were supposed to be thinking about when you're onstage.

I think the world has too many actresses.

It's harder to make something good when you can't curse all the time.

After a couple hours of this, seven-year-old Christo was beside himself. He had never been babysat before. How long was this fuckery going to go on? His sister was hysterical. He paced around our living room, now in his shirtsleeves and black pants. Pulling his golden curls nervously, he looked like the night manager of a miniature diner who had just had a party of six dine and dash. He ranted to his baby sister in Greek, This sent my mother running into the dining room laughing hysterically. I chased her. What? What did he say? Roughly translated it was Oh! My Maria! What is to become of us?

Television is a runaway train that you have to get on for nine months of the year. But at the same time, it has a wonderful immediacy.

My first job as assistant director was to make sure he didn't cast the talented blond dancer who had so easily stolen my boyfriend the summer before. I accomplished this with the persistent and skilled manipulation of a grade A bitch.

You can point any kind of laser at my face, but I don't think Botox is for me. I think it is bad. People who have too much, they look like their faces are full of candles - a shiny, shiny face.

If everyone had something to contribute, there would be enough.

If you're a die-hard "foodie," hop off the road in DuBois and enjoy a Subway sandwich made at a place that is eighty percent gas station.

called Jeff back in Chicago. "You grew up way out in the country with a bunch of brothers. Did you ever pee in cups and, like, leave them around?" Jeff was incredulous. "What? No! That's disgusting." One thousand points for Jeff.

I should have known he and I weren't going to make it when for my seventeenth birthday he gave me a box of microwave popcorn and a used battery tester. You know, to test batteries before I put them in my Walkman. Like you give someone when you're in love.

Last-ditch option for orphans and underweight babies, packaged infant formula has since been perfected to be a complete and reliable source of stress and shame for mothers. Anyone

A few months after our friendly chat about kids (and my condescending remarks about New York), Mrs. Palin told conservative filmmaker John Ziegler that Katie Couric and I had exploited and profited by her family. But I know better than to respond to attacks in the media. Although if I were to respond, I would probably just sau, Nice reality show.

I know now that no one can "steal" boyfriends against their will, not even Angelina Jolie itself.

And remember, when you work in what is basically a cage that you're not allowed to leave, your choices are limited to what strolls by.

There was an assumption that I was personally attacking Sarah Palin by impersonating her on TV. No one ever said it was 'mean' when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford falling down all the time. No one ever accused Dana Carvey or Darrell Hammond or Dan Aykroyd of 'going too far' in their political impressions. You see what I'm getting at here. I am not mean and Mrs. Palin is not fragile. To imply otherwise is a disservice to us both.

All Beyoncé and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful.

This week, penny collector Gene Sukie went to the bank and cashed in 10,000 pounds of pennies he had collected over 34 years, which were worth over 14,000 dollars. And, of course, I was in line behind him.

Never go with a hippie to a second location.

I guess what I would tell women is to get their education first, before having kids. That way they can keep their options open down the road. I also think that it shouldn't necessarily be an issue just for women, that men should be part of the stay-home discussion too.

I prefer the retro chic of spending Christmas just like Joseph and Mary did - Traveling arduously back to the place of your birth to be counted, with no guarantee of a bed when you get there.

A TV show comprises many departments - Costumes, Props, Talent, Graphics, Set Dressing, Transportation. Everyone in every department wants to show off their skills and contribute creatively to the show, which is a blessing. You're grateful to work with people who are talented and enthusiastic about their jobs. You would think that as a producer, your job would be to churn up creativity, but mostly your job is to police enthusiasm. You may have an occasion where the script calls for a bran muffin on a white plate and the Props Department shows up with a bran cake in the shape of Santa Claus sitting on a silver platter that says "Welcome to Denmark." "We just thought it would be funny." And you have to find a polite way to explain that the character is Jewish, so her eating Santa's face might have negative connotations, and the silver tray, while beautiful, is giving a weird glare on camera and maybe let's go with the bran muffin on the white plate. And then sometimes Actors have what they call "ideas." Usually it involves them talking more, or, in the case of more experienced actors, sitting more. When Actors have ideas it's very important to get to the core reason behind their idea.

Trying to Enjoy It (Proceed as if You Look Awesome)...This requires a level of delusion/egomania usually reserved for popes and drag queens, but you can do it. It's like being a little kid again, parading around in a nightgown tucked into your underpants, believing it looks terrific. Your "right mind" knows that you look ridiculous in a half-open dress and giant shoes, but you must put yourself back in third grade, slipping on your mom's quilted caftan and drinking cream soda out of a champagne glass while watching The Love Boat. You have never been more glamorous.

My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.

Day, but I knew from commercials that one's menstrual period was a blue liquid that you poured like laundry detergent onto maxi pads to test their absorbency. This wasn't blue, so ... I ignored it for a few hours.

A little tiny person with nothing to worry about running in circles, worried out of her mind.

By Real Acting I mean an imitation of human behavior that is both emotionally natural and mechanically precise enough as to elicit tears or laughter from humans.

I don't know how many more movies I'm going to get the opportunity to make and I don't want to look back and go: "Man, I just floated through that one." Or: "I did that one for the money." I want to be able to say that I worked as a hard as I could and I did the best work that I could do.

Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate about everything. No one even ate it. It just got thrown away. Cake Time is supposed to be the climax of a birthday, but instead it was a crushing disappointment for all. I imagine it's like being at a bachelor party only to find that the stripper has overdosed in the bathroom.

(Don Fey had a large rubber stamp that said "bullshit," which was and is awesome.)

You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.

In my limited experience, shows are like children. You can teach them manners and dress them in little sailor suits, but in the end, they're going to be who they're going to be.

Maybe we women gravitate toward comedy because it is a socially acceptable way to break rules and a release from our daily life.

(My proudest moment as a child was the time I beat my uncle Pierre at Scrabble with the seven-letter word FARTING.)

I have no affinity for animals. I don't hate animals and I would never hurt an animal; I just don't actively care about them. When a coworker shows me cute pictures of her dog, I struggle to respond correctly, like an autistic person who has been taught to recognize human emotions from flash cards. In short, I am the worst.

Photoshop is just like makeup. When it's done well it looks great, and when it's overdone you look like a crazy asshole.

Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them ... It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they've crossed into puberty? If so, it's working.

in the closet to grab a Sunday school

It's like being a little kid again, parading around in a nightgown tucked into your underpants, believing it looks terrific.

You've gotta stop calling each sl*ts and wh*r*s. That just makes it more okay for GUYS to call you sl*ts and wh*r*s.

Donna was an enigma wrapped in bacon wrapped in a crescent roll.

In Washington, officials from the National Rifle Association met with a group of high school students. There were no survivors.

The barrier between TV and movies has come down and film actors are willing to do TV and vice versa, because they just want to follow what's interesting.

So, my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: "Is this person in between me and what I want to do?" If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you're in charge, don't hire the people who were jerky to you.

Tracy: Stop eating people's old french fries, little pigeon. Have some self-respect. Don't you know you can fly?

My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. "You don't know their situation," my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn't even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald's food turns into cold nonfood.

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

In response to the escalating violence in Iraq, President Bush is delaying the return home of 25,000 troops and will actually add reinforcements to the south. Then in a symbolic gesture he pulled down the mission accomplished banner, put on a flight suit, walked backwards to a jet fighter and flew it in reverse off an aircraft carrier.

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

Steve Carell's Foxcatcher look took two hours to put on including his hairstyling and make-up. Just for comparison, it took me three hours today to prepare for my role as 'human woman'.

The music seems creepy, like when children sing in a horror movie

Amy Poehler and I have been friends for so long, we're like Oprah and Gale. Only we're not denying anything.

Nothing is creepier than a bunch of adults being very quiet.

But I am a big believer in "Intelligent Design," and by that I mean I love IKEA!

When my face was slashed, my dad held me on his lap in the car to the hospital, applying direct pressure with the swift calm of a veteran and an ex-fireman. I looked up and asked him, "Am I going to die?" "Don't speak," he said. So, yeah, he's not the kind of guy who wants to watch people eat bugs on Survivor. It's so clear to me how those two things are related.

"30 Rock" is over, so I definitely aspire to write another movie again; eventually, will try to pitch something for television again.

The rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview. Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path toward Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I look at the world, and it's where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?

Confidence is 10 percent hard work and 90 percent delusion.

Sometimes they just literally didn't know what we were talking about. Just as I was not familiar with the completely normal custom of pissing in jars, they had never been handed a fifteen-year-old Kotex product by the school nurse. But they

This requires a level of delusion/egomania usually reserved for popes and drag queens

Lorne knows that the most exhausting people occasionally turn out the best stuff.

Gen X wanted to succeed at this so she could tell people she did it, and little Gen Z wanted me to hand over that goddamn formula, and she was willing to scream until she got it.

I'm not a fan of purposely farting in front of other people. If you have to fart, leave the room.

There are a couple of things I want to impart to ladies who want to be in comedy: One, you don't have to be weird or be quirky to get your job done. And two, comedy skill is not sexually transmittable. You do not have to sleep with a comedian to learn what you're doing. Male comedians will not like that advice, but it is the truth.

If you care about [the characters] as if they were real, that always helps.

That's the main thing I learned in that job - how to be a considerate coworker. Cover the phones for someone so they can pee. Punch someone's time card in for them after lunch so they can stop and buy a birthday card. Help people when their register doesn't add up. Don't be a tattletale.

"I can't believe you recently had a baby. How do you do it?" The baby starts to come down ... and once that happens you can't-it comes out. Whether you let it or not, the baby comes out. So that's how I did it.

You go through big chunks of time where you're just thinking, 'this is impossible - oh,this is impossible'. And then you just keep going and keep going, and you sort of do the impossible.

I never get to go to movies, because I'm a mom.

Sleep when your baby sleeps. Everyone knows this classic tip, but I say why stop there? Scream when your baby screams. Take Benadryl when your baby takes Benadryl. And walk around pantless when your baby walks around pantless.

Mother after the Greek kids' parties because they served Italian rum cake. Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate about everything. No one even ate it.

Acting is really about showing up that day and telling the writers what you feel like saying.

Every morning, when Alaskans wake up, one of the first things they do, is look outside to see if there are any Russians hanging around. And if there are, you gotta go up to them and ask, 'What are you doing here?' and if they can't give you a good reason, it's our responsibility to say, you know, 'Shoo! Get back over there!'

Sometimes people expect that I'm going to be tough. It's not a bad situation. People treat you better. People are on time.

I don't like my feet. I'm not crazy about anybody's feet. But I have flat feet.

I really admire stand-up, and I think I would have loved to learn how to do it. I think it's terrifying and thrilling. A really cool thing to do. It's a dying art, in a way.

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.

You can't control things by being nervous ...

My Chocolate Mudslide is going down smooth when we hear the three bells. Bing. Bing. Bing. But instead of Dan Dan the Party Man, it's a woman's voice and she's breathing heavily. She sounds Filipina, if that's even a thing. "Bravo… Bravo… Bravo," she pants. "Main engine. Starboard side. Bravo… Bravo… Bravo." We hear the speaker shut off. People look around a little nervously. The dancer warming up on stage makes a beeline for backstage. Within seconds the three bells are back. Oh, thank God, it's our Greek captain. "Laydis and gentlemen, thissis your captain spicking. Pliss proceed to your muster stations." This is not what I wanted him to say. We get up and make our way painfully slowly through the completely full theater. Everyone is quiet. Which is the wooooooorst. It's scary when a group of people all know instinctively not to joke around. Another voice comes over the PA, repeating, "Please, remain calm. Please proceed to your muster stations." The German half of me is thinking, "Shove the old people out of the way. Shove the old and the infirm! If they are strong enough to resist you, they deserve to live." The Greek half of me wants to scream at our Greek captain. I do neither and proceed obediently.

Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, an exclusive state-run arts intensive that might as well have been called the Pennsylvania Governor's Blow Job Academy.

I feel like I represent normalcy in some way.

This is the same advice they give people who've just come out of rehab. After a grueling period of work (or what passes for grueling work in our soft-handed world) you will crave some kind of reward. Don't let this cause you to rush into a big decision, like a new house or a marriage or partial ownership of a minor league baseball team, that you may later regret. The interesting thing about this piece of advice is that no one ever takes 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.

As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. "No, we can't do that." "No, that's not in the budget." "No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar." What kind of way is that to live?

That night's show was watched by ten million people, so I guess that director at The Second City who said the audience "didn't want to see a sketch with two women" can go shit in his hat.

I like to write about women, not so much about the way they relate to men, but about the way they relate to each other. And I don't think anyone's really doing it.

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn't even know it because of all the jokes. It's like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids' brownies. Suckers!

Of course I'm not supposed to admit that there is triannual torrential sobbing in my office, because it's bad for the feminist cause. It makes it harder for women to be taken seriously in the workplace. It makes it harder for other working moms to justify their choice. But I have friends who stay home with their kids and they also have a triannual sob, so I think we should call it even. I think we should be kind to one another about it. I think we should agree to blame the children.

Saudi Arabian police arrested seven teenage boys for leering at women. In accordance with Saudi law, the boys will be whipped and the women will be stoned to death.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am all about money. I mean, just look how well my line of zodiac-inspired toe rings and homeopathic children's medications are selling on Home Shopping Network.

Bitch get stuff done

Bossypants Lesson #183: You Can't Boss People Around If They Don't Really Care

The same ten minutes that magazines urge me to use for sit-ups and triceps dips, I used for sobbing.

When hiring, mix Harvard Nerds with Chicago Improvisers and stir.

We City Folk can pretend that we prefer the rotgut from Starcorps with skim milk and Splenda, but who are we kidding? Maxwell House with French vanilla corn syrup cannot be beat.

Nothing gives you a fear flashback like a bunch of strangers cheering in surprise that you're not dead.

12) The Most Important Rule of Beauty
If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important Rule of Beauty. Who cares?