If you're a sports fan you realize that when you meet somebody, like a girlfriend, they kind of have to root for your team. They don't have a choice.
Chick flick is not a term used to praise a movie. Nobody says 'it's a great chick flick.' It's a way of being derisive. I'm not clear why it's ok to do it.
I must say, to my great surprise and pleasure, I deeply loved making movies in the United States because of all the opportunities it gave me to work with people that I admire as artists.
The writing of 'Topdog' was a great gift. I feel the play came to me because I realized that my circumstances, while causing me despair and heartbreak, also held great possibility, if only I could see it.
One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.
In TV, and in particular in commercials, you don't really need to explain very much at all - you just say he's a spy and he's a little bit theatrical and overblown and smug and he's not very good at his job.
What does being a woman today mean? Is there a right way of doing it? Is there a wrong way of doing it? Different kinds of women, female friendships: It's all pretty funny, and worth making fun of.
To open the majority of peoples' minds to something new is difficult. I always think that, as long as it's funny underneath, then you can argue that a teaspoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
Kids seem to get me when I play colleges - they like it because I go after them. They'll come up after and say I am like their dads, only funny.
It's funny, a lot of people think I take myself seriously because I come off so serious sometimes. But it's not that I take myself seriously, I take what I do seriously.
I think when 'The Simpsons' first came on, there was an uproar. People got used to it. They realized the show's really funny, it's got a heart, so I think it's pretty safe.
Funny things tend not to happen to me. I am not a natural comic. I need to think about things a lot before I can be even remotely amusing.
I think you have to love the characters that you write. I don't know how you could possibly write a TV show where you didn't love the characters.
I love that song 'I Could Have Danced All Night' from 'My Fair Lady' so much. I love that song because watching it as a kid, it was such an unbridled expression of joy.
Affliction is a school of virtue; it corrects levity, and interrupts the confidence of sinning.
I got Jimmy Hall from Wet Willie and he also plays now with Hank Williams Jr.
In Canada, for boys, your identity is built on hockey. It's your social position; it's everything. And I was the worst hockey player of Canada.
I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.
When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won't meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It's the perversion of idealism.
You just have to re-wire your brain when you're shifting from the stage to the screen or the silver screen or the HD flat screen.
People in D.C. are so psyched when anyone dramatizes them in an exciting way. They're a lot more open to looking at the nastier side of themselves than the media is.
