Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It shouldn't be an issue that we have a black president. Gay marriage shouldn't be an issue. And women being funny shouldn't be an issue.
It is mind-boggling to me that there are so few movies about female friendship, considering women make up half the movie-going population.
I would love to be doing more voice-over work. It's such a fun and free playground to take risks, play around, and get sort of ridiculous.
I think the world of comedy is a relatively small community, and especially for women in comedy, there just aren't that many people involved.
I have the personality where, although my ego can be healthy, sometimes I also feel like people won't remember me, or they won't know who I am.
You know what no one tells you about driving a truck? You are driving a truck. There are only side mirrors, and it does not handle like a Prius.
I played a lot of dress-up in my room. I really liked being alone. I had a lot of friends, but I had an only-child, live-in-my-head personality.
You look at Richard Pryor and Robert Klein and George Carlin and Richard Lewis - those guys were so smart, they were the thinking-man stand-ups.
As I've grown as a person and gotten to know myself more - the question of how someone becomes who they become has gotten really interesting to me.
The best and most talented directors - and I think it goes for people too - are the most confident in giving room to their actors and trusting them.
While I'm Jewish, the Hasidic world is still foreign to me. But I do understand some of the ideas of tradition and family and faith of our shared culture.
For all creative people, that's sort of everyone's journey. You feel something inside, and it takes a while to figure out what that looks like and what your voice is.
There's a certain truism that you can't be self-conscious in comedy. If I'm in it and if there's a scene that has a great set-up, I will go as far as somebody will let me.
It's the people that ultimately are less talented or have less confidence in what they're doing that then try to micro-manage, which lends itself to a less than ideal film.
When I was a kid, I did dial the 900 numbers out of curiosity, but I was such a goodie-two-shoes that I immediately hung up because I didn't want it showing up on the bill.
I want the power that comes from expressing myself creatively and putting something back into the world. Being someone's muse would be flattering, but it could get old fast.
I was more of the kind of babysitter that liked holding the baby, sort of playing Mom, and then putting the baby to bed and watching TV while eating everything in their kitchen.
The language can be different, but the emotional lives are the same no matter whether you're doing Shakespeare or Stoppard or something else... The emotional life is all the same.
In high school, everyone told me I had a great personality and sense of humor, but I wanted to be the girl who boys liked because she was pretty on top of being funny. I was boy crazy.
I did babysit a little bit when I was young. I prefer babysitting for babies. I always loved babies. I was not as great with kids that wanted to be entertained and that wanted to talk.
I think the good news for me in life is that I really trust my instincts when I come to work. Maybe less in life and in love, but in work and in comedic beats, I feel pretty confident.
I'm such a theater geek. Most of my friends are in this community, and it's really important for me to keep doing it. It takes the ego out of acting, whereas movies tend to involve it.
On stage, you have nothing to hide behind. It allows the work to live in a more organic place. It's almost like a meditation. You have to go on that stage and be as present as possible.
I think casting a show is an art form in and of itself. We're all so different - the cast is made up partly of real stand-ups, partly of actors, and then partly of just legendary actors.
When you look at all of the male characters on television and in film, it's not like every one of them are the people doing the right thing that you can point to as your own moral compass.
I went through a little hippy dippy program at Brandeis and was bat mizvahed by the rabbi who married my parents. We celebrated the High Holidays and had the traditional Rosh Hashanah dinner.
As an actor, your life is constant ups and downs. My friends and I joke that when a job ends and nothing is lined up, you have nothing to do for the rest of your life. You just ride that wave.
I was the kind of kid that always loved babies. I was, you know, four years old, and I would have my baby doll that I would bring with me everywhere and fake breastfeed on the beach and diaper.
Not one person has ever sent me a drink because I was Caroline in 'Nick and Norah.' People reference it; people say really nice things about it, but I was sure I would be getting more free drinks.
I feel like I'm sort of afraid to study too much because I feel like I work as I go, but I want to study the classics and also the technical aspects of things. I'm always looking to understand more.
When I was kid, I couldn't wait to take the world by storm, to be a woman - beautiful, powerful, confident, sexy, thoughtful, and deep. All the things I knew I was inside... even though I was only 4.
All I can to, and the only sense of control I have over this crazy moviemaking business, is to pick things that I like with people that I love and respect, and then just hope everything else works out.
Sometimes you can get stuck doing the same kind of thing over and over again, and then there's a certain moment in your life when you say, 'Wait, there's all this other stuff in me and all this other life.'
There's pressure to come up with something genius every time. I feel like I keep letting myself down with my Twitter posts. I have to start keeping a journal of rough drafts of prophetic ideas about the world.
Through working with amazing people, the bar is always raised to do your own best work. I want to be a part of unique stories that are smart, heartfelt, funny and sad, and have a general sense of good quality.
When you get into comparisons in any way of, 'we want it to be like this' or 'we don't want it to be like this,' it takes away from the authenticity of what you're trying to say and what you're trying to make.
At the end of the day, if you're an actor, you want to act. And it's not something you can do in the living room alone. If you're a painter, you can paint at home. If you write music, you can write on your own.
Sometimes you can fall into bad habits on film or rest on your laurels, and you can't do that in theater. I think it's such a useful tool as a person and as an actor to go back and forth between those two mediums.
I was a highly sensitive kid, sort of an old soul, and I felt like a lot of people in my peer group didn't fully understand me, or I couldn't fully be myself. I just wasn't engaged in a way that was fulfilling me.
The only thing that I'm not willing to do is really stupid, horribly written sitcoms. It can be tempting during pilot season time, but I realized this a while ago when I almost signed my life away to a stupid pilot.
Part of doing good work is caring deeply about it, believing in what you're doing, and getting incredibly attached to the characters that you're playing, the stories you're telling, and the people you're working with.
It's an incredible thing when you are creating something in a moment with the other people on stage and with an audience, and you are all experiencing it together as it exists in that one night. It's a magical feeling.
It's exciting to look back at the work that I've done and not have a single regret about a job I've taken. I feel really proud of every film I've been a part of. Big or small role, I feel like it was the right choices.
I was the girl who got out of my athletic requirement by managing the boys' sports teams. Which is pretty ingenious, because when I was a sophomore, I got a prom date out of it. That was really strong planning on my part.
I was playing a lot of bigger, sort-of-comedic characters in slightly heightened realities, and it had been so fun and fulfilling for a long time. But it got to a point where I just felt like I didn't have that in me anymore.
Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.
I don't know what I would have done without acting. I officially fell into it around age 6 in a class play that reimagined 'The Ugly Duckling.' My joy in performing was so boundless, you would have thought I'd just won a Tony.
Life is hard enough, so when you can get any joy out of it, whether it's something you do on a day-to-day basis, or the people in your life, or going to see a funny movie, there's just nothing better. That's what life is about.
The truth is, there are so few female roles in movies. That's really limiting. As an actor, you wanna be able to sink your teeth into something. You don't want to just be the best friend. You don't want to just be the girlfriend.
A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.