Lorne Michaels

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.

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.

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.

All babies are ugly unless they\'re your baby.

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

Could I get a friggin\' Hot Pocket around here?

You can\'t be perfect for 90 minutes.

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.

We make fun of our leaders.

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

All saints are selfish.

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 ed to look spontaneous. So I always had a dislike of that kind of thing.

I think Samantha Bee is doing a really good show.

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.

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.

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

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

Yeah, I love Los Angeles.

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

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

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.

One advantage of getting older is knowing when to worry.

Talented people are restless at their core.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Everybody blows their first money.

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.