Quotes from Kay Cannon

Tina Fey is my mentor, whether she likes it or not.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, they made it cool to be funny and to be embarrassed and to look a thousand different ways and show a bunch of different areas of their lives.

I was crazy poor, but I was learning and putting myself out there and getting hired to do whatever gig I could and auditioning.

I'm a huge fan of Ace of Base. 'The Sign?' I love that song.

I saturated myself with the improv community.

I felt that a cappella was the improv world with music, where it's very serious, and there are groups and competition, and some people become famous, and there's a language we speak from one improviser to another.

I was in relays for track where you just bonded with all these different kinds of personalities who were coming together for this one common goal of beating a rival team.

I wasn't, like, pretty enough to be the ingenue; I wasn't 'character' enough to be the goofball sidekick. I'm kind of ethnically ambiguous.

I'm actually from a small town about an hour and a half south of Chicago.

I was the runt of the family, the shortest and the smallest, so I think they perceived me as the one who was like, 'Look at me!' - just trying to get their attention and being a goofball.

No one ever actually said they were resistant because 'Pitch Perfect' was female-centric. When a project is sitting there for a while, you start to speculate about what could be the thing that might be a little tricky about it.

We're big 'Game of Thrones' fans, so we call our house King's Landing. I have a studio apartment above our garage that we call Winterfell. I go to Winterfell to write.

On the set of 'Girlboss,' I had to keep introducing myself as the show runner - literally, 'Hi, I'm the boss' - to a lot of my crew. My first AD said, 'Why do you keep doing that?' I said, 'Because I get mistaken for an extra.'

When I was younger, I wanted my hair to look like Molly Ringwald's.

I would be writing while I was breastfeeding. I didn't want the computer to be too close to her, so it was at an arm's distance away while I was clickety-clack typing away.

When I was in college, I started an improv group, and I did a bunch of plays and some musicals. I have a theater degree. I'm a school person: I like getting homework and having deadlines. When I graduated, I worked right away as an actor.

'Hot Pursuit,' 'Pitch Perfect 2,' 'Trainwreck,' and 'Spy' were all being done in the last year. All four of those movies I just mentioned are not rom-coms: they're all about women doing different things.

'Bridesmaids,' I think, opened up a door to allow women to show a bunch of different women in different ways of being funny. It was kind of like an arrival moment.

Second City Las Vegas is very different from Second City in Chicago on the main stage, where they do improv sets. That's how they kind of hone material, kind of work up to new material.

It's interesting: when you're kind of 'known' for being a writer, people don't think you've done anything else.

It's not about having luck; it's about putting yourself in a position of luck.

Ultimately, I want to direct a movie, so that's another thing, too, where I wonder what that will look like and how will I be able to manage.