I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.

I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.

I would come back to public school for usually about half the year. It was actually better for me to be out of school a lot, because I was two years younger than everybody, which is a bad situation, socially.

You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.

The theater business is very much about "Hey, if you want our big blockbuster at Christmas time, you'll play our piece of crap in April."

You have to do real acting, not just do a voice.

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.