Tina Fey Quotes

If you are capable people are happy to play with you.

In my experience, the hardest thing about having someone "come out" to you is the "pretending to be surprised" part.

Ladies gotta say no to their husbands at the movies. They gotta say: "No, we are watching back-to-back cancer movies. And then this movie about a cat."

Gay people don’t actually try to convert people. That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses you’re thinking of.

You transition as a mother from literally just pulling a booger out of that person's nose whenever you see one until at some point they assert: "No, I'm a person. You can't fix my underpants on the subway."

Whenever you see me, I'm on antique quaaludes.

What Turning Forty Means to Me I need to take my pants off as soon as I get home. I didn't used to have to do that. But now I do.

Sometimes when you're doing a comedy, the director will yell out "alts" and then the director gets the first laugh.

This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. You're up for a promotion. If they go for a woman, it'll be between you and Barbara. Don't be fooled. You're not in competition with other women. You're in competition with everyone.

When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable.

I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society…unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.

I like to crack the jokes now and again, but it's only because I struggle with math.

Luxury cruises were designed to make something unbearable (a two week transatlantic crossing) seem bearable. There's no need to do it now, there are planes. You wouldn't take a vacation where you ride on a stage coach for two months but there's all-you-can-eat shrimp. You wouldn't take a vacation where you had an old-timey appendectomy without anesthesia while steel drums play. You might take a vacation while riding on a camel for two days IF they gave you those little animal towels wearing your sunglasses.

An acting teacher once told me, 'Greet everything with yes... Even if you abandon one idea for another one, saying yes allows you to move forward.'

Every day I wrote in my journal: "How am I going to win today?" So that when the guys are talking about water-boarding I'm telling them they haven't even got the right towels.

Finally the world would see my full range of comedy characters - from grouchy librarian to Russian librarian.

I think people fetishize glasses in general. You could put glasses on a rotting pumpkin and people would think it was sexy.

I never get to go to movies, because I'm a mom.

Not only is my wardrobe totally average, my body's totally average. I love all the candy-fantasy fulfillment of Sex and the City.

Last night the Taliban offered to release eight Westerners if the U.S. promised not to attack. The State Department declined but thanked the Taliban for the offer, saying it really felt good to laugh again.

Sometimes, you can feel or see how a movie can... how you can do it. Sometimes it's just like seeing, "Can that work? Will people buy that? Can we do that?" And all those checkmarks.

Your initiations are worthwhile.

I think for women especially, you need to have a plan. I need to have some other ways to generate income, so I don't have to stretch my face or lift the top of my head with surgery or something.

I have to say, I'm really not that attractive. Until I met my husband, I could not get a date.

[Television] is a great medium for writers, because there's just no time for a studio to interfere very long. You write it, you shoot it; it's on TV.

I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did.

I love to play strippers and to imitate them. I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that.

We're gonna promote freedom. Usher in democratic values and ideals. And fight terror-loving terrorists.

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.

[...] things most people do naturally are often inexplicably difficult for me.

Most of my work is done before we start shooting, preparation work, so my normal day begins when I start writing, it might even be the night before.

You’re in competition with everyone.

I’m not a mean person, but I have a capacity for it. I have the biting comment formed somewhere in the back of my head — like it’s in captivity. Sometimes people expect that I’m going to be tough. It’s not a bad situation. People treat you better. People are on time.

If a bout of "creepy face" sets in, the trick is to look away from the camera between shots and turn back only when necessary. This also limits how much of your soul the camera can steal.

It was reported that the New York Knicks have won all 12 of the home games attended by magician David Blaine. A spokesman for the Knicks said, 'if this is what it takes to win, it's not worth it.'

I went through a phase where I was sick of acting, I didn't want to do it anymore, I was bored with it and then I tried directing a movie and I was like: "Shoot, get back over there!" It made me appreciate acting more.

Photoshop is just like makeup. When it’s done well it looks great, and when it’s overdone you look like a crazy asshole.

The only way I could get comfortable around people was to make them laugh.

Confidence is 10 percent hard work and 90 percent delusion.

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.

Now let me be clear; millions of women around the world nurse their children beautifully for years without giving anybody else a hard time about it. Teat Nazis are a solely western upper-middle-class phenomenon occurring when highly ambitious women experience deprivation from outside modes of achievement.

I don't weigh myself. I just go by if my clothes fit. I try not to participate too much in the incredible amount of wasted energy that women have around dealing with food. I just feel like being healthy is sort of a job requirement to be on TV, and being a writer is so much coping with fatigue and stress, and you just eat. You eat to stay awake.

Everybody kind of gets to be the person they didn't get to be.

If you want to be a screenwriter, take an acting class to get a sense of what you're asking actors to do. Learning other skills will help you communicate with people and respect what they do.

After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that's where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.

I'm such a fan of Lily's [Tomlin], for so many years. I feel like Lily was the first popular mainstream crossover comedian who also was kind of an overtly feminist comedian.

In Washington, officials from the National Rifle Association met with a group of high school students. There were no survivors.

When I first set out to ruin SNL, I didn't think anyone would notice, but I persevered because - like you trying to do a nine-piece jigsaw puzzle - it was a labour of love.