Once I went to film school, I realized that film directing was actually much better than theater directing, because you kind of get to stay in control of it all the way through. You don't relinquish the piece to the actors like you have to in theater...
Usually, like, on 'Mean Girls,' the task that Tina Fey and I set for ourselves was we wanted to maintain a comic intensity throughout the movie, where people just don't really get a break from laughing. And if they do, it's for a brief emotional scen...
I once volunteered to teach English as a second language, and I thought that I would have all these intense relationships with all these people from other worlds. Then you get there, and it's like, 'This is a pencil. This is a pencil' And afterward, ...
Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.
Thank God I was hit by a truck. It seems that God was trying to get my attention for years but I was so stubborn it took knocking me square out of my body to see him for myself. Next time I will be way more specific when I ask for help to slow me dow...
I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people eith...
I looked into studying psychoanalysis, wrote to the governing body and was about to start the year where they psychoanalyse you, four times a week, before you get to do it yourself. I just thought I'd taken the ventriloquism as far as I could. My act...
Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often somethi...
I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.
And by the way I don't object if people want to attack me, that's their right. All I'm suggesting that it's not going to be very effective and that people are going to get sick of it very fast. And the guys who attacked each other in the debates up t...
If you want to be an actor, you should keep confident. Don't get too much of an ego and become not humble. But you should have esteem and not feel bad when you don't book something. So I think you should just stay humble, but you also need to have so...
I was going to the library, too. I'd get my parents to drop me off at the library on their way to work in the morning during school vacations. Sometimes my dad would embarrass me by making me take sandwiches. I was absolutely fine given the prospect ...
In high school, I went to a place called the Mountain School. It's on a farm in Vermont, and I read Emerson and Thoreau and ran around the woods. Now I go hiking with a bunch of my comedy buddies. We talk about our emotions. I also do a lot of writin...
So something that never should have happened did, all because of my thoughts and actions. A clear-cut cause-and-effect relationship. I was the one who caused it, and I should probably get the death penalty. Or maybe what I should say is I'm the one w...
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other. When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people ...
The thing about curly hair is that it's a toss-up. Some days you can let it air dry and it's better than a hair-do, but some days you just look like a sloppy person. I'm really resistant to a trim. I only do it when it gets hard to brush out in the s...
A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.
I see robotic technology getting rid of the dangerous, the dirty, and the just plain boring jobs. Some people say, 'You can't. People won't have anything to do.' But we found things that were a lot easier than backbreaking labor in the sun and the fi...
Why did Google, for example, recently decide to offer free 411 service? I haven't talked to people at Google, but it's pretty clear to me why. It's because of speech recognition. It has nothing to do with 411 service: it has to do with getting a data...
I'm unpredictable, I never know where I'm going until I get there, I'm so random, I'm always growing, learning, changing, I'm never the same person twice. But one thing you can be sure of about me; is I will always do exactly what I want to do.
Dallas is an extraordinary place in it's own right. The first thing about Dallas that you can't get away from, particularly when I arrived, you've got no idea of the heat in this place. It's over 100 degrees, and with that the humidity is ridiculous....
