I want to be around people that do things. I don’t want to be around people anymore that judge or talk about what people do. I want to be around people that dream and support...

Motherhood was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, all-encompassing job. It was the hardest job I ever had. Everything that happened to you [her child] happened to me. I had once heard children described in a novel as “hostages...

Your career and your passion don’t always match up.

Update

Let’s end by pointing out all the positive ways you can scare yourself and feel alive. You can tell someone you love them first. You can try to speak only the truth for a whole...

Doing comedy for a living is, in a lot of ways, like a pony and a camel trying to escape from the zoo. It’s a ridiculous endeavor and has a low probability of success, but...

A person’s tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren’t one story. We can change our stories. We can...

Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about...

I also think if you’re an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you’re just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and...

Bedtime is fraught with fear and disappointment. When it is just me alone with my restless body and mind, I feel like the whole world is asleep and gone. It’s very lonely. I am tired...

If you don’t eat pussy, keep walking.

THE HOLIDAYS ARE RUINED!This book is one page long and just contains that one sentence.

I “dated” one boy and our song was “Faithfully” by Journey. Every time it played my body would turn electric, and I would stare out whatever window I was near and reminisce about experiences I...

I think the idea of ensemble should really be re-enforced and that’s staying with the same group of people. In college troupes the turnover can be so fast and so furious that you don’t ever...

If you ever want to see heaven, watch a bunch of young girls play. They are all sweat and skinned knees. Energy and open faces.

I will say it again. Ambivalence is key.You have to care about your work but not about the result. You have to care about how good you are and good you feel, but not about...

Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it.

It’s a struggle for me to remain open,” she admits. “To not shut down because I’m defensive or scared or maybe my ego is getting in the way. And the other side of that is...

I’ve said this before, that, when you’re in school and you’re the class clown, men are really good at making fun at other people and women are really good at making fun of themselves. I’ve...

Looking silly can be very powerful. People who are committing and taking risks become the king and queen of my prom. People are their most beautiful when they are laughing, crying, dancing, playing, telling the...

You are all so good and I wish I were better. Now get out of here because I want to be where you are.

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled...

Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I’m proud that Mike Schur and I rejected the idea...

If you do a scene and you really like a character in it or a premise in it to write it down and to work on it so that you can have five or six...

Ignore what other people think. Most people aren’t even paying attention to you.

Dating in highschool was very different. Boys suddenly went up your shirt, girls were expected to give blow jobs and be sexy. You had to be hot, but not a slut. You had to be...

We want to extend our adolescence as long as we can,

Your […] is a really warm older Hispanic lady who has a beautiful laugh and loves to hug. If you are even a little bit nice to her she will make you feel great and...

In a recent Valentine’s Day posting on her fan website, Britney Spears says that – oh, who cares?

Treat your career like a bad boyfriend. Your career wont take care of you. It won’t call you back or introduce you to its parents. Your career will openly flirt with other people while you...

I was a really good waitress. Waitressing takes a certain gusto. You need a good memory and an ability to connect with people fast. You have to learn how to treat the kitchen as well...

Improvisation is almost like the retarded cousin in the comedy world. We’ve been trying forever to get improvisation on TV. It’s just like stand-up. It’s best when it’s just left alone. It doesn’t translate always...

Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again.

It’s not communism, it’s shouldn’t be that everybody gets a try no matter how good or bad they are. It’s our profession and our art, so we should eventually strive to be working with the...

I often look to men to model behavior,” she goes on after a pause. “Not because I want to squelch what’s feminine about me, but because sometimes I want a little more action, a little...

Let me take a minute to say that I love bossy women. Some people hate the word, and I understand how “bossy” can seem like a shitty way to describe a woman with a determined...

You tell somebody you’re an improviser and they think you’re doing Random Acts of Comedy and it’s just like, a bastardization of what I think is the purest form of art. People still don’t get...

Look at this woman. This beauty. What an act of grace. What a gift she gave me.Shame makes people abandon their children and drink themselves to death. It also keeps us from true happiness. An...

So, if you’re doing good longform with talented people than you can step out and you can be the president or a construction worker and people accept that. It’s really the roles you give yourself.

We kept our heads down and did our jobs. We controlled the only thing we could, which was the show. We did the thing. Because remember, the talking about the thing isn’t the thing. The...

When your children arrive, the best you can hope for is that they break open everything about you. Your mind floods with oxygen. Your heart becomes a room with wide-open windows. You laugh hard every...

I.O. was kind of like comedy high school. Everybody knows each other, dated each other, performed together, lived together – so there’s a lot of history among a lot of people.

Girls, if a boy says something that isn’t funny, you don’t have to laugh.

Sometimes in my class I have people come in and do monologues inspired by people they know and I always find that to be useful to do specifics about somebody and then you’re actually doing...

It’s never overreacting to ask for what you want and need.

I made a decision early on that I would be a plain girl with tons of personality, and accepting it made everything a lot easier. If you are lucky, there is a moment in your...

I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I’d consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It...

It is completely improvised. We have had no meetings backstage, we have not written anything, and everything you see onstage tonight is being made up on the spot,

Is there a word for when you are young and pretending to have lived and loved a thousand lives? Is there a German word for that? Let’s say its schaufenfrieglasploit.

There’s a couple of enemies to improv, and one of them is editing; when you edit on TV it makes it seem like it’s not really improv.