Tina Fey Quotes

If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn't you also be able to inhabit a character?

The one thing I could do was voices and impersonations and weird characters, and there was really no call for that, except on Saturday Night Live.

Some actors try to play parts and do things they can't do. Being funny is one of them. Being funny's hard.

I sort of consider myself a comedic actress, not a comedienne. I think it's different. You know, I'm not a stand-up or anything, but playing into comedic situations is sort of where, I think, my strength lies.

I did comedies for 10 years and I learned a great deal.

I love doing scripted things. What little acting ability I have I am holding on with my hangnails.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

I was very serene, and I still am, until I start talking in another voice, then suddenly I have a lot of volume and I'm frantic. But I didn't want to be one of those people who's always talking in accents in real life, so I started doing sketch comedy.

At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.

It's nice when I get offered small parts. But I really think that 'SNL' is what my skill set is best designed for.

To be totally honest? I don't know if I'll keep doing more impressions. People told me I had a facility for it, and I was like, 'Okay, I'm the impression guy.' So you imagine the cast at 'SNL' is an A-Team, and you've got the explosives guy, and I'm the impression guy.

It seems like a really fun way to make a living, but I'm truly terrible at acting.

I learned so much from Jane Lynch. She was the funniest and most talented person. She taught me so much about being a performer.

I'd always wanted to try my hand at every bit of the acting field.

As a kid I would watch 'SCTV,' 'Saturday Night Live,' 'Monty Python' and 'The Kids in the Hall,' and be amazed that these guys got to be different people every week. It spoke to the acting side in me.

I started performing non-professionally at birthday parties and family gatherings doing 'Saturday Night Live' impressions at four. Then I started for real at seven.

I think that acting could be a talent.

I've always enjoyed acting, and there's more than a degree of it involved in singing live on stage.

Stand-up is not something that you're good at right away. You have to do it a ton. But, I think I got to shave a year off because I didn't have to get over stage fright.

Probably the most fun I've ever had, actually, acting. Because it was the perfect extension of the stuff that I'd started to do on Late Night With David Letterman, and when I look back on all my work, it was probably the best possible incarnation of Chris Elliott, of me.

The fact that I like to make characters doesn't mean that I like to watch my characters being made, my performance.

I feel much more comfortable as a writer than an actor. I feel like I am a much better writer than I am an actor.

I've learned almost everything I know about acting from my dad.

I started 'SNL,' and I became the one who did impressions. I did that, but then I wanted to get an original character on, and that took a long time to get one on that stuck. And then I got Vinny Vedecci on - 'Oh great' - and then it took a couple more seasons to get Greg the Alien on. You have to have some patience.

I know very little about acting. I'm just an incredibly gifted faker.