I put my life in danger every time I do some of these demonstrations, whether it's in the audience hanging upside down or on the stage. We now have a lot of dangerous stunts where anything can go wrong. In fact, I have fallen two stories and landed o...
I'm very happy with the way I look. I wake up some morning, catch myself in the bathroom mirror, and go, 'hey girl, you're alright'. But on the other hand, I find the website stuff, and the polls, something completely removed from my own personal lif...
Every single thing that you learn really just gives you more comfort. It's something I counsel kids all the time: if someone is willing to teach you something for free, take them up on it. Do it. Every single time. All it does is make you more likely...
At 35, I'm definitely starting to feel more like a grown-up than I ever have. There's nothing in my life that is childish or whimsical. Having fun is fantastic and I never want to lose a sense of that - and also, I think, you have to have that to put...
I haven't always had the money rolling in. I'm a character actor; it's not like I'm Gwyneth Paltrow - so I do have hard times still in my life. And that's even more why it's like you know what, I'm not that different from people going through it. I s...
I will make up a crush, you hear me?! I will look at a guy and say, for two months at least, 'I think you're cute.' And then I can be psycho. I will go in my head and make a whole life with him, he don't even understand why I'm mad at him. I'm like.....
At this stage of my life I would rather try and have some small impact within a company and suffer through those things than make such a big stink that nobody can trust to work with you. It's very important in an environment of a big institution that...
A nerd will be a nerd all his life. When we did The Nerd Book at National Lampoon, the nerds got picked up as if there were a lot of them at every school - and there aren't. Maybe two. There are many more geeks. A geek is a guy who has everything goi...
Marriage is a lot of things - a source of love, security, the joy of children, but it's also an interpersonal battlefield, and it's not hard to see why: Take two disparate people, toss them together in often-confined quarters, add the stresses of mon...
I think right now the way society's going, I think role models are important, and kids need direction. If I didn't have that direction growing up, who knows what I could be doing, because I've been lost many times in my life, and I've had to have som...
The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage ne...
I'm not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody's throat: 'You're going to do it my way.' I'd rather show by example and live my life and have people say, 'You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He's got peace and joy, and he seems ...
As an ex-stand up, I can tell you that a comedy club isn't a place you go looking to get the abuse you just can't seem to find in daily life. The stage is a performer's domain. You protect that domain. You are not on stage to take what's given just '...
I am very sure that my children thrive on structure and need boundaries. I know my children need to know what time they are going to bed or how many more minutes until they are leaving for school, and so I have imposed a structure that allows them to...
A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexuality, and that breaks my heart, because they're going to have to - high school's hard enough to overcome. Middle school is hard enough to overcome when we get out of it. They say life is what you spend ...
I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the wor...
Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong...
Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you ...
It's all about the mood I'm in and the scene I'm writing. 'Cause work controls my life, writing controls my life, performing controls my life. So I don't listen to any music that's not an influence on what I'm working on that day. Music is a big infl...
You can have anything you want, but not everything. If it was really important to spend an afternoon at my daughter's school, I had to think, how was I going to organize my life to do that? How could I become more efficient? I always tried to put my ...
When I was younger, I didn't have the finer things in life. It was around me - the cars, the jewelry and all of that. But I didn't have it. So I did bad things to get what I wanted. Going to jail never crossed my mind. I wish it had. When I was locke...
