Tina Fey Quotes - Page 7

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I guess what I would tell women is to get their education first, before having kids. That way they can keep their options open down the road. I also think that it shouldn't necessarily be an issue just for women, that men should be part of the stay-home discussion too.

I was ten. I had noticed something was weird earlier in the day, but I knew from commercials that one's menstrual period was a blue liquid that you poured like laundry detergent onto maxi pads to test their absorbency. This wasn't blue, so... I ignored it for a few hours.

The comedy for the Democrats is that they're showing off too much. They need to be putting a boring white guy out there to kind of get a hold of things. Once the boring white guy is out there, then you bust out the junior senator from Illinois who smokes and does cocaine.

If you watch [The] Search for Signs of Intelligent Life [in the Universe], or The Incredible Shrinking Woman, or 9 to 5, there is a lot of gender politics at the forefront of Lily Tomlin work, which was kind of thrilling for me to be watching as a 10-, 11-, 12-year-old kid.

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 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 became immersed in the cult of improvisation. I was like one of those athletes trying to get into the Olympics. It was all about blind focus. I was so sure that I was doing exactly what I'd been put on this earth to do, and I would have done anything to make it onto that stage.

Some people work with a trainer, some people work with a stylist. I work with a celebrity fecalist. A fecalist is basically a person who comes and collects my stools, and then examines them to see if I'm eating right and if I should be drinking more water and what my moods should be.

I had to face the fact that I had been using my gay friends as props. They were always supposed to be funny and entertain me and praise me and listen to my problems, and their life was supposed to be a secret that no one wanted to hear about. I wanted them to stay in the “half closet.

The ideal situation for a parent is one that no one has - having a fulfilling job that requires you to work three days a week. It's better for the parents, because they get to spend time with the children and also have a source of pride and achievement - and income - outside the home.

I hope for his sake that Tracy's apology will be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers at 30 Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket.

You can be a little bit darker and rougher on the stage, partly because when you're in the theater, people have come to see you, and so they kind of know what they're in for. In television, you are sort of sneaking into people's homes. So, I think you can be a little bit darker on stage.

I don't know how many more movies I'm going to get the opportunity to make and I don't want to look back and go: "Man, I just floated through that one." Or: "I did that one for the money." I want to be able to say that I worked as a hard as I could and I did the best work that I could do.

I work, and then whenever I have any other time, I'm with my daughter, and then I go to sleep. I think you basically have to abandon the dreams of having any other adult activities in your life. You have to go to sleep whenever your child goes to sleep. That's basically how we're doing it.

If you are a woman and you bought this book for practical tips on how to make it in a male-dominated workplace, here they are. No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly. (Some people say “Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.)

My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald’s food turns into cold nonfood.

I feel like there is a lot of inherent humor in the stress and insanity surrounding that process. People lose their minds, trying to prove their parental worth by getting their children into one of five colleges; when there are thousands of good colleges across the United States - and elsewhere.

Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don't know who that's attributed to. I think it's Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.

Maternity leave is over for Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live. She'll be back behind the Weekend Update anchor desk for this week's episode, her first show since giving birth to daughter Alice on Sept. 10. I had to get back to work, .. NBC has me under contract; the baby and I have only a verbal agreement.

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.

MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.

George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an advisor to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected for a three-person commission investigating rules of war violation in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.

I have no affinity for animals. I don’t hate animals and I would never hurt an animal; I just don’t actively care about them. When a coworker shows me cute pictures of her dog, I struggle to respond correctly, like an autistic person who has been taught to recognize human emotions from flash cards. In short, I am the worst.

Every morning, when Alaskans wake up, one of the first things they do, is look outside to see if there are any Russians hanging around. And if there are, you gotta go up to them and ask, 'What are you doing here?' and if they can't give you a good reason, it's our responsibility to say, you know, 'Shoo! Get back over there!'

There are a couple of things I want to impart to ladies who want to be in comedy: One, you don’t have to be weird or be quirky to get your job done. And two, comedy skill is not sexually transmittable. You do not have to sleep with a comedian to learn what you’re doing. Male comedians will not like that advice, but it is the truth.

We're all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn't let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn't let us watch 'The Flintstones' if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of 'The Honeymooners'. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old 'Honeymooners'.

In response to the escalating violence in Iraq, President Bush is delaying the return home of 25,000 troops and will actually add reinforcements to the south. Then in a symbolic gesture he pulled down the mission accomplished banner, put on a flight suit, walked backwards to a jet fighter and flew it in reverse off an aircraft carrier.

For my first show at 'SNL', I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn't getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, 'Okay, that happened, and I did not die.' You've got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.

I definitely think of myself still as a writer first, and feel like - with the lucky exception of this - any acting opportunity I've gotten is usually because I was writing on it. This is like a wonderful vacation. If you've ever sat in a writers' room it's the most disgusting, tortuous place, so it's a treat to be treated like a movie actor.

It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it...You have to let people see what you wrote.

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.

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.

I wrote a one-act play - I can't remember the name of it, but it was really about the way women are perceived as leaders. In the play, Catherine the Great would say things like, "You know, John F. Kennedy had extramarital affairs and no one says anything. But I bang one horse and now I'm a horse banger for all eternity? That's it? That's what I am?"

It was scary to be in that world of politics. I felt uncomfortable to be in that discussion. The weird thing is, when Darrell Hammond or Will Ferrell or Dana Carvey did an impersonation of a president, no one assumed it was personal, but because Sarah Palin and I are both women and people think women are meaner to each other, everyone assumed it was personal.

Read! When your baby is finally down for the night, pick up a juicy book like Eat, Pray, Love or Pride and Prejudice or my personal favorite,Understanding Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy and Apnea; A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my "plan" was for taking down the Christmas tree.

Feminists do the best Photoshop because they leave the meat on your bones. They don’t change your size or your skin color. They leave in your disgusting knuckles, but they may take out some armpit stubble. Not because they’re denying its existence, but because they understand that it’s okay to make a photo look as if you were caught on your best day in the best light.

One afternoon a girl walked by in a bikini and my cousin Janet scoffed, “Look at the hips on her.” I panicked. What about the hips? Were they too big? Too small? What were my hips? I didn’t know hips could be a problem. I thought there was just fat or skinny. This was how I found out that there are an infinite number of things that can be “incorrect” on a woman’s body.

I was taken to an examining room where a big butch nurse practitioner came in and asked me if I was pregnant. “No way!” Was I sexually active? “Nope!” Had I ever been molested? “Well,” I said, trying to make a joke, “Oprah says the only answers to that question are ‘Yes’ and ‘I don’t remember.’ ” I laughed. We were having fun. The nurse looked at me, concerned/annoyed.

And don't think that by eating freedom fries you are being patriotic and helping the war effort. Use less gasoline, read a newspaper. You know what, how about we cool it with the freedom fries anyway you fat asses. We're the fattest country in the world. Have you ever walked around an American mall? It's nothing but chick fillets and Lane Bryant track suits busting at the seams.

‘How do you juggle it all?’ people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. ‘You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?’ their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggle as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.

So, my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.

there was an assumption that I was personally attacking Sarah Palin by impersonating her on TV. No one ever said it was 'mean' when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford falling down all the time. No one ever accused Dana Carvey or Darrell Hammond or Dan Aykroyd of 'going too far' in their political impressions. You see what I'm getting at here. I am not mean and Mrs. Palin is not fragile. To imply otherwise is a disservice to us both.

Now every girl is expected to have: Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.

I’ve always been able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask me about my scar. Most people never ask, but if it comes up naturally somehow and I offer up the story, they are quite interested. Some people are just dumb: 'Did a cat scratch you?' God bless. Those sweet dumdums I never mind. Sometimes it is a fun sociology litmus test, like when my friend Ricky asked me, 'Did they ever catch the black guy that did that to you?' Hmmm. It was not a black guy, Ricky, and I never said it was.

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women - except, of course - those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape 'kit 'n' stuff. But for everybody else, it's a win-win. Unless you're a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years - whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know - actually, I take it back. The whole thing's a disaster.

Now if you're not „hot”, you are expected to work on it until you are. It's like when you renovate a house and you're legally required to leave just one of the original walls standing. If you don't have a good body you have down to a neutral shape, then bolt on some breast implants, replace your teeth, dye you hair, and call yourself the Playmate of the Year. How do we survive this? How do we teach our daughters and our gay sons that they are good enough the way they are? We have to lead by example.

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.

Once or twice a week I would set my alarm for six A.M. so I could get up and plug in Hot Stix...I would study the curls in the mirror, impressed with both the appliance and my newfound ability to use it. Then, without fail, at the last second before leaving for school, I would ask myself, "Am I supposed to brush it out or leave it?" Why could I never remember" That feeling of "I'm pretty sure this next step is wrong, but I'm just gonna do it anyway" is part of the same set of instincts that makes me such a great cook.

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