Lorne Michaels

Yeah, I love Los Angeles.

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.

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.

We make fun of our leaders.

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'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.

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.

All babies are ugly unless they're your baby.

All saints are selfish.

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 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.

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

I think Samantha Bee is doing a really good show.

Sometimes the wheel turns slowly, but it turns.

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.

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.

You can tell a lot from someone's eyes.

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.

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

Could I get a friggin' Hot Pocket around here?

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.

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.

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

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

You can't be perfect for 90 minutes.