Adam McKay

“I was completely with the reality TV boom for a while. I really liked a lot of the reality TV, and the one that lost me was the ballroom dancing one they do, 'Dancing with the Stars.' That was the one where I watched it and I was perplexed. I thought it was really boring.”

“Nowadays, the truth is, I think a lot of the newer generation of action stars usually are pretty self-deprecating and cool. I mean, Dwayne Johnson is a great example.”

“McCain is the kid who was really cool in middle school but never got high school game and people are sick of him acting like he's still popular.”

“White-collar crime has been marketed - billions of dollars have been put in to have us be bored by it.”

“When I was at 'SNL,' I would constantly get in arguments, 'Why aren't we more political? We're not going after Bush.' Then look what happened - that Sarah Palin season, they were on fire. It was about something.”

“There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.”

“I don't think arrested-adolescent humor will fade. Maybe the form will change, but I guarantee its replacement will still be based in immature behavior from mature figures.”

“The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.”

“I guess HBO did a giant 'War in the Pacific' mini-series that cost, like, a fortune, and there was a little moment where they literally had no money. And even though the show had become kind of a cult hit, there was an issue of whether they could actually afford to do it.”

“Truth is like poetry.And most people fucking hate poetry.”

“The thing is, I've gotten massages to Enya. I like Enya. If you ate fantastic steaks to Celine Dion, you'd like Celine Dion.”

“A dry stretch of commentary in the middle of an 'Anchorman' movie would have been a terrible thing.”

“You're not a slave to those test audiences.”

“The corporate right fires up the religious right against gay marriage and abortion and uses their votes to push their deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. It's an old trick. The House of Saud has the same arrangement with the Mullahs in Saudi Arabia.”

“As far as how much you listen to the audience, you listen to them when they really hate something.”

“Ultimately, the only people who are in any way edified by hanging with famous people are you at the age of 11 and your mom.”

“I have no tax breaks or corporate interests to be supported by Barack Obama.”

“I think I'm better than Mamet, I would say.”

“Creative freedom is a huge carrot.”

“There's nothing more fun than mean-spirited characters.”