Quotes from Alex Borstein

I was kind of the comic relief in my household. We had a chronic illness in the family. And so, a lot of emergency room visits, and my role was to be silly and add levity, and we're Jewish. So every Passover is a performance. You kind of learn to role play and do voices at the Passover Seder.

My rhetoric degree ended up being very helpful in advertising. I got an internship and then figured I will be a copywriter; that will be my path.

My grandmother was in line to be shot into a pit. She said, 'What happens if I step out of line?' He said, 'I don't have the heart to shoot you but somebody will,' and she stepped out of line. For that, I am here and my children are here. So step out of line, ladies, step out of line.

I never became a road comic.

I always loved performing, but my parents were very practical, middle-class Jewish people.

I got my degree in rhetoric.

Television and film acting is really fun because you are working with other people and you are not completely responsible for the outcome of the project.

People who have picture-perfect upbringings and lives tend not to be funny. I don't think they write from a position of pain.

I'm terrible at learning lines. I'm good at learning lines when I don't have to be word-perfect.

'Getting On' - that show, it broke my heart. It really was like the greatest love of my life. I'm forever changed by it.

The hardest thing in the world to depict dramatically is stand-up.

If you believe in romance, and if you believe in marriage, you also have to believe in divorce. It's like, with 'Getting On,' a lot of people say, 'I don't want to watch that. It's so dark.' But you can't just want to go to weddings and children's birthday parties. You've got to witness it all.

When I was doing stand-up, there were a lot of things I talked about that seemed very silly but were therapeutic.

I grew up with a grandmother from another country and having a different language in my house. That gave me an ear for accents.

Losing my grandmother was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through.

Stand-up's hard. It's one of the hardest things in the world, and it's really lonely.

Amy Sherman-Palladino is very funny. She's got just natural timing and comedic instinct. And she writes in a comedic rhythm.

I think I was born because my parents had two boys and wanted to give it one more go and try for a girl... they got me instead.

Animation is very similar to sketch comedy: you have a short amount of time to do something big and ridiculous and funny.

My dad was raised Orthodox in Atlanta. He speaks Hebrew. He speaks Yiddish. He married a Jewish woman who is not Orthodox, so I was brought up by two different kinds of Jews.

'Getting On' is just the coolest experience ever, and working with people like Laurie Metcalf, that's the joy. That's what I love about it.

I love the freedom of voice-over and the ability to play multiple characters I could never play in real life: a hot young woman, a little boy.

I don't want pictures of my kids anywhere. I don't tweet pictures of my kids. I don't put them on any social media. I definitely do like to keep some privacy that way. And mostly, it's fear-based; people are crazy.

Usually, impersonations come out of something you dig, because you're listening to it over and over. And you kind of start developing... You're really trying to emulate them, then you realize, 'I sound ridiculous doing this. Oh, hey, maybe this is a funny impersonation.'