Tina Fey

“I work, and then whenever I have any other time, I'm with my daughter, and then I go to sleep. I think you basically have to abandon the dreams of having any other adult activities in your life. You have to go to sleep whenever your child goes to sleep. That's basically how we're doing it.”

“I'm a big fan of 'The Office', both the British and the American versions.”

“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.”

“In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. 'You can't do that. There won't be enough parts to go around. There won't be enough for the girls.' This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury. We weren't doing _Death of a Salesman._ _We were making up the show ourselves. How could there not be enough parts?_ If everyone had something to contribute, there would be enough. The insulting implication, of course, was that the women wouldn't have any ideas.”

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

“Don't waste your energy trying to change opinions ... Do your thing, and don't care if they like it.”

“I think my level of fame will drop back down. I think it'll recede. In fact, I know it will. That's life on Planet Earth. And I'm okay with that. Besides getting tables at restaurants and special treatment at the airport, what else is there?”

“Being a mom has made me so tired. And so happy.”

“You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated.”

“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 really love cursing a lot. But as I get older, I realize it's a little unseemly for women of a certain age.”

“I think if you ask any of us here, we all dreamed of ending up on Saturday Night Live. I remember thinking, 'I'll just keep doing this as long as I can get away with it.'”

“An interim government was set up in Afghanistan. It included two women, one of whom was Minister of Women's Affairs. Man, who'd she have to show her ankles to to get that job?”

“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.”

“Mary Tyler Moore was a working woman whose story lines were not always about dating and men. They were about work friendships and relationships, which is what I feel my adult life has mostly been about.”

“My dad looks like Clint Eastwood. His half-Scottish, half-German face in repose is handsome but terrifying. I searched the audience for him during the sixth-grade chorus concert and, seeing his stern expression, was convinced that he had seen me messing up the words to the Happy Days theme and that I was in big trouble. I spent the rest of the concert suppressing terror bumps, only to be given a big hug and a kiss afterward. It took me years to realize, Oh, that's just his face.”

“I don't want to be somebody else.”

“By the way, when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your fucking life.”

“Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don't know who that's attributed to. I think it's Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.”

“Don't hire anyone you wouldn't want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning.”