Kate McKinnon Quotes

I'm not an impersonator. I'm a lousy impersonator, actually.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

The genius of the Marx Brothers is for parody. They never are themselves. They exist too abundantly to be content with being that - they must go on, by the rapidest of transitions, to being something else. Groucho, in my opinion the bright star among the three, is never anything but the thing he is at the moment pretending to be.

I enjoy taking jobs that make fun of me - or me as Princess Leia, or me as the writer, or whatever, as some idea.

I think impersonation is a great art. It's something that I enjoy doing, in a frivolous and lighthearted way. But I don't flatter myself to think I'm an impersonator.

I used to dress up and impersonate our next-door neighbor, Miss Cox. She wore rubber boots, a wool hat, and her nose always dripped.

One of my favorite things about sketch comedy is doing parodies and music videos.

Peter Sellers was just a brilliant actor, and also comedic.

I've been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles.

An actor is an impersonator; he plays many different roles. If you played the same role all the time, God - that'd be a boring career. When you take on different roles and become a different person, that's called acting... It's a challenge.

My dad turned me onto Peter Sellers as a kid. I loved the fact that he was a unique combination of being extremely subtle and over-the-top all at the same time, and that's a hard thing to do. I admire that.

The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

It's funny - if you impersonate somebody, they have no idea it's them.

We ape, we mimic, we mock. We act.

My ultimate is Peter Sellers - his ability to go broad and somehow humanize that and be hilarious at the same time. He was just relatable, real at the same time as insane. I find Ricky Gervais absolutely hilarious. Steve Martin is another hero of mine - he's a genius.

I enjoy getting to work on 'Saturday Night Live', where I get to do people like David Paterson. And then, its like a different muscle to do someone like a bicycle guy on' Portlandia'.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

When you saw Jon Lovitz or Dana Carvey or Phil Hartman doing something, they were acting. It was real acting. Like, they were acting like that person. They weren't like - it wasn't even like they were really trying to go for a laugh, especially in Phil Hartman's case.

I was just the perfect person to play the Mini-Me character.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.

When I played Imunique on 'Love That Girl,' that was on the other side of comedy - loud and out there.

No actor wants to play someone else's performance.

When people think of performing they usually think of show-offs, but I think of it more that you disappear into somebody else.