John Oliver

Our president-elect [Trump] has at various times said he’d bomb civilians, loot oil, and waterboard, which isn’t a military strategy so much as the series of words that Donald Rumsfeld mutters so he can stay hard while he’s masturbating.

Payday loans are like the Lay’s Potato Chips of finance. You can’t have just one and they’re terrible for you.

The death penalty is like the McRib. When you can’t have it, it seems so tantalizing. But when they bring it back, you think, ‘Wow, this is ethically wrong’.

Congress is like jazz – it’s really about the bills it’s not passing. It’s also like jazz in that most people hate it and anyone who says they don’t are lying.

But it’s been 114 years. It’s like for over a century, America’s computer’s been saying, An update to your country is available and we’ve been clicking Remind me later again and again and again.

Any single part of Brexit is a mountainous task and that is before you get to the tiny little bits that you understand that we haven’t even thought might be a problem. John Oliver

Here in L.A. the standard of beauty is kind of ridiculous. I want to be doing this when I’m in my fifties and sixties and this isn’t what I’m going to look like.

I’m a chocolate addict!

I could be walking down the street one minute and get a handshake and then get spat on the next. I’m never sure whether to wear gloves or a helmet.

When I was 17, my producer Rodney Jerkins was working with Michael Jackson at the time. He knew how much I wanted to meet Michael Jackson, so he says, ‘Would you like to come and meet him?’ I’m like, ‘Are you serious? Of course I want to meet Michael Jackson! Where do I meet you? Where do we come?’

[on which film had a bigger impact on her career – “The Notebook” or “Mean Girls”] For me personally it would be The Notebook. That was something I was dying to do when I read the script. I worked with so many amazing people and people responded so well to that film, and continue to. In terms of an impact on my career, that was significant. Mean Girls speaks to a really large audience, which is the kids and they eat that stuff up. I don’t know. It’s hard to choose.

I was rapping as a hobby. It was something I did for my friends and just played around on ideas and stuff like that.

I think if you ask any of us here, we all dreamed of ending up on Saturday Night Live. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll just keep doing this as long as I can get away with it.’

[On her most dreadful crush] I used to drive, pretty pathetically, I’d just drive by their house all the time and they didn’t know who I was. I’d just drive by the house all the time. I once knocked on the window and I thought, “What am I doing? What am I going to say if they come to the door and don’t know who I am?”

I think social media has given everyone a voice. Social media makes everyone a celebrity on some level. I think that diminishes the power of an artist who bases their trade on their talent, that’s one of the downfalls. But the good thing is that you can connect with your fans all the time.

Even when you know you want to do something, know that it will be good for you, that you’ll enjoy [performing] when you’re doing it, the anxiety is telling you a different story. It’s a constant battle within yourself.

I think they can co-exist. You don’t have to put one down for another. I’ve been bitten by the acting bug, and where it takes me, it won’t take away from the music.

I really had to think and learn about musical intervals.

It hits you in small ways and large, doesn’t it? For instance, had you considered the fact that portraits of Trump are going to be hanging in our airports? Uh… or that the man who disparaged a Gold Star family will now be expected to comfort the families of fallen soldiers? And maybe you’ve tried to make yourself feel better, fantasizing that he might Google how much does the president get paid?, get depressed, and then resign. But that is when you remember Mike fucking Pence, who might be even worse, because he looks like he’s from the 1950s, but he thinks like he’s from the 1650s. Oh, what’s that, you say? Her pregnancy was terminated before birth? Well, clearly she’s a witch. Hold a funeral for the fetus and throw the mother in a lake.

I never get to go to movies, because I’m a mom.

The second I met Zac, I thought he was a really cool guy. It’s hard not to have chemistry with someone who is so attractive.