When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

The first thing you've got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it.

I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.

In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.

Sometimes, songs spill out of you very fast, and sometimes you have to wrangle them to the floor. But the same thing is true of comedy, where sometimes it really flows.

A movie script more than anything else is a plan of action for the crew. Everybody in the crew looks at the script to see what they're going to do. It has to contain where you are, and how many people are there, and what they do, and what time of day it is, and what time of year it is.

I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years.