Tina Fey

You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring.

When I started on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I had the choice of wearing contact lenses, which I had never worn before, or glasses, in order to be able to read the cue cards.

Please welcome the woman I have been assigned to mentor – Lindsay Lohan.

The only way I could get comfortable around people was to make them laugh. I was an obedient girl, and humor was my one form of rebellion.

I’m not that good looking… nobody is that good looking. I have seen a lot of movie stars, and maybe four are amazing looking. The rest have a team of gay guys who make it happen.

Even when I was at ‘SNL,’ I didn’t do impersonations. I always wanted to be the kind of person who could do them – I always thought they were the coolest thing on the show – but I didn’t have any experience.

What gets me is how many women – young women – give up their power and sense of self. Thinking they’re going to get more out of life if they take off their clothes and objectify themselves, instead of functioning on the principle that they’re smart and capable, that you can be an actress and not be on the covers of T&A magazines. I’m flabbergasted by how many legitimate actresses do that. It blows my mind.

To be honest, I don’t want No. 1’s anymore. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind the odd few, but I’d also like a record going in at eight and staying around.

I don’t think I’m very much like anyone else, really. I’m sure there are aspects of other actors that I share, but I don’t see anybody else and go, “Damn, they stole my thing”. I’m me, and I like that there are people who have an appreciation for that.

His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.

I aspire to be Jack Nicholson. I love every single mannerism. I used to try and be him in virtually everything I did, I don’t know why. I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was about 13, and I dressed like him. I tried to do his accent. I did everything like him. I think it’s kind of stuck with me.

We lived the life with Keith Moon. It was all Spinal Tap magnified a thousand times.

When I was a kid, I’d be there in the stands thinking: ‘Come on Wolves, do it for me!’….And here I am again: ‘Come on Wolves,’ pleading with a borrowed laptop!

Whenever you’re scared of something, don’t let that define you. We all feel it, but step up.

[on acting] I just enjoyed it as soon as I started doing it. It fulfilled something in me, and I’m so lucky that I found it.

When it comes down to the music, it’s just you and the microphone. It’s not you and the record execs.

I’ve always been very positive and very resilient.

The whole idea of music, from the beginning of time, was for people to be happy.

One Christmas, when Freddie and I were flatmates in Kensington, we were trying to cook Christmas dinner but all we had was a packet of bread sauce that you make with water. We used to dream of a can of beans. (…) At Ridge Farm, when we weren’t working we would swim, play bad tennis, bad snooker and be beaten at table tennis by Freddie. I think he had been the champion at his boarding school and I never, ever saw him lose a game. That summer was more like a youth club rather than wild parties. In the evenings we would go down to the pub, come back to the barn and play more music.

I didn’t know how to throw a punch – why would I? Who knows how to throw a punch? Now I do it all the time, and it makes me feel strong.

I love being sexy; I’m never gonna stop being an exhibitionist