Dana Carvey

“I wasn't very good as a puppet. A lot of times in a movie, you need a really good puppeteer: you're sort of a puppet, and you're doing what you can. But I always, from the beginning, was kind of making up my own stuff from stand-up and sort of directing myself, so I wasn't very good in movies where I didn't have control.”

“Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.”

“Corporate stand-up allowed me to make my own schedule and make money as if I was in show business.”

“I have a theory that if you're famous more years than you're not famous, then you get a little nutty.”

“I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.”

“I'm thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level.”

“I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.”

“I think free speech is probably the coolest thing we have in this country, and again, you can label it hate speech and dismiss it, and then you're allowed to censor it.”

“I always tend to think of all of my shows as possibly my last show. I'm like a junior Springsteen, without the underbite.”

“I did a lot of ridiculous television. Between 1980 and '85 I had no confidence, so I did everything I was told to do.”

“You just have to be very humble if America has really worked for you like it has for me. Most of my friends are poor. Most of my siblings are poor. I see how hard it is just to get money unless you've got some incredible luck or work incredibly hard. I want everyone to do well. I wish 'Wayne's World' money on you!”

“I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.”

“There was no Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade where I was from. Looking back on it, I was trying to do sketch comedy in my stand-up, which is still kind of what I am doing now. To go full-circle here, it's kind of like one-man sketch.”

“I have this dream life where I get to be a celebrity but I get to navigate the world fairly easily because I'm always in character.”