Top 39 Quotes & Sayings by Lorne Michaels

When Sinead O'Connor tore up the picture of the Pope, you could hear a pin drop. I didn't know it was coming, obviously, because at dress, she had held up a picture of Balkan orphans, which I thought was really meaningful and what she wanted to do.

All saints are selfish.

All babies are ugly unless they're your baby.

We make fun of our leaders.

Sometimes the wheel turns slowly, but it turns.

To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.

There are things in low comedy that make people uncomfortable, and there are things in high comedy that make people bored.

If a culture doesn't allow you to laugh at the leaders or at things that your eyes and ears tell you are actually happening, that's not good.

I grew up in a time where on things like 'The Red Skeleton Show' or even to a certain extent on 'The Carol Burnett Show,' people wrote in the breakouts or ad-libs. They were scripted to look spontaneous. So I always had a dislike of that kind of thing.

One of the nice things about being busy is it makes you focus on what's important to you and how you use your time.

It's better when they laugh, isn't it?

I think Samantha Bee is doing a really good show.

You can tell a lot from someone's eyes.

Tearing up a picture of the Pope comes under the heading of a Comedy Killer. It kind of breaks the spirit of the evening.

I was in Los Angeles in 1968, and I was fortunate enough to be a writer on 'Laugh-In' and a couple of other television shows.

I'm always very fearful when academics get ahold of comedy. Comedy is such a clear thing - people laugh, or they don't laugh. It's involuntary. I'm not saying it can't be scrutinized, it's just that they take the enjoyment out of it.

'Saturday Night Live' has always been, you know, non-partisan - whoever's in power should probably be challenged.

I'm incredibly proud of the show 'Portlandia' that I do, but it's designed for an audience that just wants that and loves that.

I think that Canadians have an incredible reverence for authority and regard for authority, and I think one of the healthy ways that it's challenged is through questioning it, through the polite hostility of comedy.

People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it's scary. And the bear because it's intense, but the monkey makes people laugh.

You can't be perfect for 90 minutes.

The only show I ever really wanted to do was 'SNL.' It was some sort of merging of my talent and my metabolism. It suited who I am and what I do really well, though whatever I was thinking it was, it kept mutating and growing. At first, I didn't even know that the cast would be the thing everybody talked about. We thought it would be the hosts.

There's nothing that sells stuff like television. Nothing.

Could I get a friggin' Hot Pocket around here?

Yeah, I love Los Angeles.

I am always looking for what I think are original voices.

Fatigue is your friend. Through exhaustion and through people just being so depleted, the stuff around the nerve endings gets worn away and other things begin to emerge and you take way bigger risks.

Talented people are restless at their core.

The only way you can really deal with creative people is with very loose reins.

When I'm scrambling between dress and air, there are people I like more than other people.

If the way they make the show makes it fresh, then it's worthwhile. I think all of these forms have to be blown up every now and then and start again.

One advantage of getting older is knowing when to worry.

Even the most powerful people at a given point in terms of class, will all play by the same rules.

I can't concern myself with how viewers feel.

If you look around the room, and you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

Some people, their whole lives, are just injustice collectors. They’re going to find new injustices every day. That’s what they do, and that’s what they are.

I don’t tweet for a very simple reason, which is that I drink.

A guy comes home from college to find his mother sleeping with his uncle, and there's a ghost running around. Write it good, it's Hamlet; write it bad, it's Gilligan's Island.

Everybody blows their first money.