“If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.”

I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice.

When a coworker shows me cute pictures of her dog, I struggle to respond correctly, like an autistic person who has been taught to recognize human emotions from flash cards. In short, I am the worst.

There are no mistakes only opportunities.

I am going to dedicate myself, full time, to my day-drinking.

You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.

It was reported that the New York Knicks have won all 12 of the home games attended by magician David Blaine. A spokesman for the Knicks said, ‘if this is what it takes to win, it’s not worth it.’

If you want to be a screenwriter, take an acting class to get a sense of what you’re asking actors to do. Learning other skills will help you communicate with people and respect what they do.

I think women dress for other women to let them know what their deal is. Because if women were only dressing for men, there would be nothing but Victoria’s Secret. There would be no Dior.

An acting teacher once told me, ‘Greet everything with yes… Even if you abandon one idea for another one, saying yes allows you to move forward.’

You do not have to sleep with a comedian to learn what you’re doing. Male comedians will not like that advice, but it is the truth.

You go through big chunks of time where you’re just thinking, ‘this is impossible – oh,this is impossible’. And then you just keep going and keep going, and you sort of do the impossible.

Start with a ‘Yes’, and see where that takes you.

A wise friend once told me, ‘Don’t wear what fashion designers tell you to wear. Wear what they wear.’

Even more amazing: not the worst review the movie got.

You transition as a mother from literally just pulling a booger out of that person’s nose whenever you see one until at some point they assert: “No, I’m a person. You can’t fix my underpants on the subway.”

If you are a woman and you bought this book for practical tips on how to make it in a male-dominated workplace, here they are. No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly.

How can you get bored if the audience is cheering and laughing at something you’re doing?

Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

Or try out what I learned and see how it worked with an audience, because where are you gonna get an audience?

So that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It’s an extraordinary thing. It’s wild turf up there.

[Salomaybe] is my presentation, my vision of the world. Not so much to satisfy the audience at large.

I did it in Looking for Richard, too. And I figure, if I can weave it into the actual play and get the audience interested, like the robes going up and down, they’ll pay attention long enough to consume it.

Is it possible to do something that that makes an audience uncomfortable, challenges them, makes them see things they’re not used to?

Obviously given good health, and a continuing audience and a record company that allows me to do music.