Quotes from Jessica Williams

The color and the diversity dies out, and it gets whiter and whiter, and that's in any field. There is also this idea that there can only be one gay person or there can only be one Asian-American woman in the office, and so it also perpetuates itself where we are isolated, especially the more successful we get.

I feel like acting is sort of like that: You're getting so many 'no's all the time. It's just a bunch of no's and a couple of cool yes's. And especially with comedy, too, when you're up on stage, doing live shows, you get immediate yes's or no's.

I love it when women are like, 'You guys sound like me and my best friend!'

When I was a young lady, I never fantasized about getting married.

For me, so far, confidence has been a journey, not a destination.

I think we need to not speak over black women, not assign them labels.

I'm a young person; sometimes I'm political, sometimes I'm not.

I'm a tomboy, but I really love doing my makeup - I find it relaxing and grounding. With 'The Daily Show,' it was easier for me to do my own makeup. In the beginning, I watched a lot of YouTube tutorials. You find a beauty blogger who has your skin tone, and pretty much everything they use will look good on you.

The world is ready for a more sophisticated 'TMZ.' If there's one thing I've learned, it's that any dummy with a half-decent idea can become a billionaire.

We're all trying to catch up with Beyonce. We're all running a race, and Beyonce is up there, and we're all just trying to run and get there. That's my motivation.

My natural hair is who I am. I have lots of braids, and I have lots of twists, but it's all very low maintenance. I feel like I can get up and go and get out of the house. I just don't have it in me to get my hair done all the time.

Ultimately, when I deliver something, a lot of times it will be from a black woman's perspective, but other times it will be just from a satirical, goofy perspective.

I grew up hearing, 'You're pretty for a black girl,' 'You speak well for a black girl...' I was really bookish. I was reading all of the time. I had big glasses.

Race affects everything that I do, and everything that I create speaks to intersectionality.

I can be pretty harsh and judgmental. I'm a very harsh and judgmental person. I like morals, right and wrong. I like to see things in black-and-white when I can, so I will hold a lot of guys to an impossible standard.

You can learn so much just by observing.

Sometimes, you feel like, 'Am I going to be upset about this as a black person or as a woman first? Or am I gonna be both?' Because some things inherently affect black women; some things affect you as a woman and not a black person; and some things just affect you as a black person.

I looked up at my mom, and I was like, 'Well, Mom, uh, when you really think about it, C's aren't really that bad. C's are average.' And I've never seen my mom so upset, to this day. I just saw this flash of fire in her eyes, and she yelled, 'Average? You are never allowed to be average, because you look like me.'

You don't have to be African American to really enjoy 'Frisky Business'. But as far as being black, a lot of people in New York have been stopped and frisked, so that hits home for them.

I'm a young correspondent, so sometimes I'm just young. Sometimes I'm just straightforward.

I wanted to do screenwriting. That's what I went to school for, but my major was overfilled, and when I got 'The Daily Show', I was a semester away from officially starting my major, so I never started that in particular.

I feel like now is great time for a rom-com because the genre is sort of being opened up to being told by people that look different from each other or who have different orientations.

There's something missing in all this new new media craziness, and that is something that uses celebrity news as a way to get into a really serious analysis of our culture.

As far as diversity's concerned, there's me, there's Al Madrigal, there's Aasif Mandvi. But I'm not walking around feeling black all the time. That would stress me out.