Lorne Michaels

“I think that Canadians have an incredible reverence for authority and regard for authority, and I think one of the healthy ways that it's challenged is through questioning it, through the polite hostility of comedy.”

“I'm incredibly proud of the show 'Portlandia' that I do, but it's designed for an audience that just wants that and loves that.”

“You can tell a lot from someone's eyes.”

“All saints are selfish.”

“When Sinead O'Connor tore up the picture of the Pope, you could hear a pin drop. I didn't know it was coming, obviously, because at dress, she had held up a picture of Balkan orphans, which I thought was really meaningful and what she wanted to do.”

“I grew up in a time where on things like 'The Red Skeleton Show' or even to a certain extent on 'The Carol Burnett Show,' people wrote in the breakouts or ad-libs. They were scripted to look spontaneous. So I always had a dislike of that kind of thing.”

“We make fun of our leaders.”

“To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.”

“Yeah, I love Los Angeles.”

“'Saturday Night Live' has always been, you know, non-partisan - whoever's in power should probably be challenged.”

“There are things in low comedy that make people uncomfortable, and there are things in high comedy that make people bored.”

“I'm always very fearful when academics get ahold of comedy. Comedy is such a clear thing - people laugh, or they don't laugh. It's involuntary. I'm not saying it can't be scrutinized, it's just that they take the enjoyment out of it.”

“People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it's scary. And the bear because it's intense, but the monkey makes people laugh.”

“Tearing up a picture of the Pope comes under the heading of a Comedy Killer. It kind of breaks the spirit of the evening.”

“There's nothing that sells stuff like television. Nothing.”

“I think Samantha Bee is doing a really good show.”

“I was in Los Angeles in 1968, and I was fortunate enough to be a writer on 'Laugh-In' and a couple of other television shows.”

“Could I get a friggin' Hot Pocket around here?”

“It's better when they laugh, isn't it?”

“If a culture doesn't allow you to laugh at the leaders or at things that your eyes and ears tell you are actually happening, that's not good.”