Whitney Cummings

“After school, I'd wait for someone to pick me up and no one would, so I'd be like, 'I guess I'll walk home.' I had to be a hustler, because nobody did anything for me.”

“I wrote a 'Lenny Letter' on a whim, and it felt indulgent, but people came up to me with tears in their eyes saying, 'Thank you.' There's so much shame about mental illness in our country and so many stereotypes about women being 'crazy' or 'psycho.'”

“Sometimes the funnier you are, the more vulnerable and scared you are underneath it all. So I think, for me, comedy was always a defense. It was a weapon so that you can't hurt me.”

“In the entertainment industry, there is this fear of getting older, because we have high definition television now, and you can see things that the human eye can't even pick up. But the good thing about standup is that the older you get, the funnier you get.”

“Comedians are obsessed with justice and the truth.”

“In my business, you have so many things going at once - TV shows, projects, movies - and sometimes, things never actually come to fruition.”

“Stand-up. It's the only place I'm comfortable.”

“The indie movie world is like a bad Tinder date, and there are always strings attached.”

“The most dangerous place I've ever performed standup is in my home state of California.”

“I guess the verdict is in - I am not a sociopath. It's not effective or productive not to be nice. It would undermine the goals I want to achieve on any given day.”

“Saying women aren't funny is now like saying Asians can't drive or saying black people have bad credit. It's just really, like, so obsolete.”

“We're socially constructed to hide our flaws, and that breeds pain for a lot of people.”

“Being known doesn't get you anywhere; it just makes the bar and the expectations higher, especially if the venue wants to charge a certain ticket price because you're known. So people are like, 'I paid $60 to see you, and you're on TV'.”

“I have a theory, which is that the idea of a roast is to go to this forbidden, uncomfortable, almost performance-art-level shock place, but because we're so regularly shocked and offended today, the idea of an hour and a half of unbridled negativity is just so unappealing.”

“I don't want to look at myself - ever. All I see is that my face is a problem. It's asymmetrical. I get terrible bags under my eyes.”

“I feel like, in a lot of shows where the woman is in charge, the woman is this ball buster and the guy is sort of weak and spineless. And that's never been my experience in a relationship. I think it's much more interesting that the guy is the boss. And there are stakes.”

“One of the big conversations I'm trying to have onstage right now is that to be pro-woman, you don't have to be anti-man. Saying all men suck makes you look like an idiot. And it's not helpful.”

“I had a moment where I was onstage once... As a comedian, you just think, 'Be funny as possible all the time - like, funny at all costs - jokes, jokes, jokes.' That's how my mentality was.”

“I did some pretty embarrassing modeling, like catalogs and QVC. I know there's probably a stereotype where all pretty girls think they're unattractive, but modeling is the worst thing for your self-esteem, because you're never pretty enough, you're never thin enough.”

“For writing stand-up, I have to have a little bit of anger and frustration to be motivated to do it. Stand-up, for me, comes from kind of a hostile engine.”