A Quote by Tina Fey

If you're an actor and you don't get cast in stuff a lot, then put together a show or hold play-reading nights at your apartment. Make your own opportunities.
You collapse a few times, and you put your head in your hands, and you say, "Oh my god, how am I gonna get through this?" You have a few of those nights, and then you get over it and you keep it moving. And those nights... As you get more used to the strain, I guess those nights are fewer and farther between. So that's the best you can hope for. It's a tough job and it's a lot to pull out of your brain.
There were a lot of lessons of production to be learned. On the page, the biggest thing you learn on any TV show is how to write to your cast. You write the show at the beginning with certain voices in your head and you have a way that you think the characters will be, and then you have an actor go out there, and you start watching dailies and episodes. Then, you start realizing what they can do and what they can't do, what they're good at and what they're not so good at, how they say things and what fits in their mouth, and you start tailoring the voice of the show to your cast.
en you show up to work and put on your undergarments, throw on your suspenders and your cowboy boots, throw some dirt on you, and then get on your spurs, you start to walk a bit different. When you put on your gun belts, you change again. You go through this whole transformation process. All that stuff changes you. Riding a horse changes the way you walk and your demeanor.
If you don't want to play and get concussed, then don't play. It's your career, it's your life. You have to make that decision on your own.
If you can't hold your own, you're gonna get knocked out. You're bleeding all over the place. There are many, many nights that these boys are crawling off the mats. They drop from body shots, their nose is just bleeding like a faucet. On Wednesday nights, they come in and get a beating. It only happens once with these guys. You'll get karate experts or Tae Kwon Do experts and they can't hold a candle.
Hold on to your dream. Don't let past failures or dire economic forecasts make you a pessimist. Keep your youthful dreams alive and create your own opportunities.
In the stand-up comedy top, there's room for everyone - if you're good, there's room for everyone. You'll put on your own show - no one casts you. You cast your own show as a stand-up comedian. When you get good at stand-up comedy you book a theater and if people show up, people show up. If people don't show up, people don't show up. You don't have a director or a casting agent or anybody saying if you're good enough - the audience will decide.
And we've read scary books and watched scary movies and TV shows together. He's met monsters, ghouls, and demons on the page and on the screen. There's nothing like watching Anaconda with your best friend or lying in bed next to your mother reading Roald Dahl, because that way you get to explore dark stuff safely. You get to laugh with it, to step out on the vampire's dance floor and take him for a spin, and then step back into your life. When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.
Being an actor/ writer is a responsibility and a burden and a gift. The responsibility to me is that you can't just wait to be cast into something and then you create the role. You almost have a voice inside of you telling you what you might want to play and be able to play. It's hard, but once that thing comes out of the printer and you hold those warm pages to your cheek it's great. It's a huge sense of accomplishment.
I've seen people spend days, if not months, researching and gathering data, but only at the end did they finally figure out what they were really looking for; then they have to redo a lot of stuff. If after a day or so you force yourself to put together your tentative conclusions, then you'll have guidance for the rest of your research.
How do you make your kids read more? It needs to be presented as a joy and a privilege to get to do it, and the kids should get to see you as a parent reading for your own pleasure. It's not something you send your kids off to do, 'Go into your room and read for 15 minutes or else.' It becomes a task then.
Comedians dissect jokes all the time. Comedians are beautiful structuralists. But ultimately it's an athletic endeavor. You have to be able to just hit the backhand. You can't think about all the pieces of it. You can't think about your swing. You just have to do it. Reading someone else's deconstruction of what I do, all it does is put me in my head. On nights when the show goes particularly well, I am not aware of its fluidity. A lot of nights I'm just worried that I'm not going to be as good as the script in front of me.
I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.
You create your own material to try to get it out there because a lot of people are multi-hyphenates, to use the corporate term. You're creating stuff to be in in order to showcase all your talents. I think the idea of using YouTube and the Internet, you don't have to wait around for a network to buy your show.
No matter what kind of significance leads you do, you learn a lot from doing schlock. The setup's the same, only you have to work twice as hard to make it the best as you can make it. And a lot of acting is not about acting but technology. Are you standing in your light? Are you out of your light? And if the sound guy's near you, please don't put the coffee cup down at that moment, because you're covering your lines. All of that stuff's going on in your head, so you learn a lot by doing whatever. In my view, never worry that something's not prime - A, number - one stuff.
In most cities, it doesn't cost much to put your own show on a local access channel, so you get all sorts of strange stuff on the air.
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