Tina Fey Quotes

I have a suspicion - and hear me out, 'cause this is a rough one - I have a suspicion that the definition of "crazy" in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore. The only person I can think of that has escaped the "crazy" moniker is Betty White, which, obviously, is because people still want to have sex with her.
Tina Fey
I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did.
Tina Fey
It was a major and deeply embarrassing teenage revelation. It must be how straight teenage boys feel when they realize those boobs they like have heads attached to them.
Tina Fey
As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.” What kind of way is that to live?
Tina Fey
It's one thing to be a wisecracking precocious teen hanging out with twenty-seven year olds.It's another thing to get in the way of a grown man trying to get laid.
Tina Fey
I have a strong urge to lie down and pretend this is not happening—like the old couple in Titanic.
Tina Fey
There's a Drunk Midget in My HouseAh, babies! They're more than just adorable little creatures on whom you can blame your farts. Like most people who have had one baby, I am an expert on everythiing and will tell you, unsolicited, how to raise your kid!
Tina Fey
There are different types of fancy photographers. Some are big, fun personalities like Mario Testino, who once told me, “Lift your chin, darling, you are not eighteen.” I enjoyed his honesty. Also, I’m pretty sure he says that to models who are nineteen.
Tina Fey
Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. ...It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they've crossed into puberty? If so, it's working.
Tina Fey
There is no one of-woman-born who does not like Red Lobster cheddar biscuits. Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar and a Socialist.
Tina Fey
Lorne knows that the most exhausting people occasionally turn out the best stuff.
Tina Fey
(Don Fey had a large rubber stamp that said "bullshit," which was and is awesome.)
Tina Fey
Your father doesn't fucking play games. you would never come home with a shamrock tattoo in that house.
Tina Fey
A wise friend once told me, 'Don't wear what fashion designers tell you to wear. Wear what _they_ wear.' His point being that most designers, no matter what they throw onto the runway, favor simple, flattering pieces for themselves.
Tina Fey
I find, the fancier the fashion magazine is, the worse the Photoshop. It’s as if they are already so disgusted that a human has to be in the clothes, they can’t stop erasing human features.
Tina Fey
Because, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I was embraced by the gays. They loved me and praised me. I was funny and so mean and mature for my age!
Tina Fey
It is a testament to my parents that they never reacted negatively to the four-year-long pride parade that marched through their house.
Tina Fey
One family, two impressively gay brothers.
Tina Fey
It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it...You have to let people see what you wrote.
Tina Fey
You've gotta stop calling each sl*ts and wh*r*s. That just makes it more okay for GUYS to call you sl*ts and wh*r*s.
Tina Fey
5) The Eyes Are the Windows to Where the Soul Is Supposed to Be
Tina Fey
(My proudest moment as a child was the time I beat my uncle Pierre at Scrabble with the seven-letter word FARTING.)
Tina Fey
You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to fuck it.
Tina Fey
Photoshop is just like makeup. When it’s done well it looks great, and when it’s overdone you look like a crazy asshole.
Tina Fey
This is one of the weird things about motherhood. You can predict that some of your best moments will happen around the toilet at six am while you're holding a pile of fingernail clipping like a Santeria priestess.
Tina Fey
And when she [her daughter] one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends,For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.
Tina Fey
That night's show was watched by ten million people, so I guess that director at The Second City who said the audience "didn't want to see a sketch with two women" can go shit in his hat.
Tina Fey
The second rule of improvisation is not only to say yes, but YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then _add something of your own._ If I start a scene with 'I can't believe it's so hot in here,' and you just say, 'Yeah...' we're kind of at a stand-still. But if I say, 'I can't believe it's so hot in here,' and you say, 'What did you expect? We're in hell.' Or if I say, 'I can't believe it's so hot in here,' and you say, 'Yes, this can't be good for the wax figures.' Or if I say, 'I can't believe it's so hot in here,' and you say, 'I told you we shouldn't have crawled into this dog's mouth,' now we're getting somewhere.
Tina Fey
The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you're improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we're improvising and I say, 'Freeze, I have a gun,' and you say, 'That's not a gun. It's your finger. You're pointing your finger at me,' our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, 'Freeze, I have a gun!' and you say, 'The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!' then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.
Tina Fey
So, to sum up my room-clearing generalizations, men are in comedy to break rules.
Tina Fey
I was walking home alone from school and I was wearing a dress. A dude drove by and yelled, "Nice tits." Embarrassed and enraged, I screamed after him, "Suck my dick.
Tina Fey
Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity
Tina Fey
This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn't want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that's permed on top? What's that you say? None of them want that? You are correct.
Tina Fey
It’s a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it…You have to let people see what you wrote.
Tina Fey
In improv there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents. And many of the world’s greatest discoveries have been by accident.
Tina Fey
My first job as assistant director was to make sure he didn't cast the talented blond dancer who had so easily stolen my boyfriend the summer before. I accomplished this with the persistent and skilled manipulation of a grade A bitch.
Tina Fey
(My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.)
Tina Fey
Lots of teenage girls have taken comfort under the wings of half-closeted gay boys.
Tina Fey
Someone should do a study of the human brain and how quickly it can adjust to luxury.
Tina Fey
Everyone is quiet. Which is the wooooooorst. It’s scary when a group of people all know instinctively not to joke around.
Tina Fey
I have one top-notch baby with whom I am in love. It's a head-over-heels "first love" kind of thing, because I pay for everything and all we do is hold hands.
Tina Fey
Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?
Tina Fey
the best of" show was completely gone and we were in big trouble, except we didn't really care.
Tina Fey
You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated.
Tina Fey
What is he rudest question you can ask a woman? 'How old are you?' 'What do you weigh?' No, the worst question is 'How do you juggle it all?' people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. 'You're fucking it all up, aren't you?' their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggles as any working parent but with the good fortune of working my dream job.
Tina Fey
We spent days and weeks doing nothing, calling one another ten times a day to schedule our nothing-doing.
Tina Fey
In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. 'You can't do that. There won't be enough parts to go around. There won't be enough for the girls.' This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury. We weren't doing _Death of a Salesman._ _We were making up the show ourselves. How could there not be enough parts?_ If everyone had something to contribute, there would be enough. The insulting implication, of course, was that the women wouldn't have any ideas.
Tina Fey
My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.
Tina Fey
You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn't even know it because of all the jokes. It's like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids' brownies. Suckers!
Tina Fey
When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?” We wrote down our answers and shared them, first in pairs, then in larger groups. The group of women was racially and economically diverse, but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. “I was walking home from ballet and a guy in a car yelled, ‘Lick me!’” “I was babysitting my younger cousins when a guy drove by and yelled, ‘Nice ass.’” There were pretty much zero examples like “I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team.” It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they’ve crossed into puberty? If so, it’s working.
Tina Fey
Anytime there's a bad female stand-up somewhere, some dickhead Interblogger will deduce that “women aren't funny.” Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups.
Tina Fey
My dad looks like Clint Eastwood. His half-Scottish, half-German face in repose is handsome but terrifying. I searched the audience for him during the sixth-grade chorus concert and, seeing his stern expression, was convinced that he had seen me messing up the words to the Happy Days theme and that I was in big trouble. I spent the rest of the concert suppressing terror bumps, only to be given a big hug and a kiss afterward. It took me years to realize, Oh, that's just his face.
Tina Fey
Don't hire anyone you wouldn't want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning.
Tina Fey
In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.
Tina Fey
Ever since I became an executive producer of 30 Rock, people have asked me, 'Is it hard for you, being the boss?' And, 'Is it uncomfortable for you to be the person in charge?' You know, in that same way they say, 'Gosh, Mr. Trump, is it awkward for you to be the boss of all these people?
Tina Fey
Don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions; go over, under, through, and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.
Tina Fey
...Whenever someone says to me, 'Jerry Lewis says women aren't funny,' or 'Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny,' or 'Rick Fenderman says women aren't funny... Do you have anything to say to that?'Yes. We don't fucking care if you like it.I don't say it out loud, of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist, Hitchens is very sick, and the third guy I made up.
Tina Fey
[T]he definition of 'crazy' in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.
Tina Fey
And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women - except, of course —those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape ‘kit ‘n’ stuff, But for everybody else, it’s a win-win. Unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years - whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know - actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster.
Tina Fey
My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald’s food turns into cold nonfood.
Tina Fey