An interesting thing about the beginning of our friendship and professional collaboration [with Tina Fey] was that the improve scenes we would do together were basically dramatic and not funny at all.

I have these meetings with really powerful men and they ask me all the time, 'Where are your kids? Are your kids here?' It's such a weird question. Never in a million years do I ask guys where their kids are. It would be comparable to me going to a guy, 'Do you feel like you see your kids enough?'

I think chemistry is about not acting, but reacting, and not talking, but listening.

Just breathe. Sometimes you're only a few breaths away from feeling better.

I had to come to terms with how I saw myself. I had to understand that I wasn't pretty or beautiful like most actresses and that I shouldn't care about whether other people found me attractive or not.

It's very hard to watch comedy for me, when I'm doing a comedy show, because I either watch a show and I love it, and I'm jealous, or I watch a show and I see all the problems with it, and I'm angry that I watched it.

[At Boston College] I started working on the kinds of skills that you need for comedy. It's about being creative and learning to use your gift for being able to let loose and be very unself-conscious. It took me time though before I was really able to get comfortable doing that.