Quotes from Lorne Michaels

All saints are selfish.

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

I think Samantha Bee is doing a really good show.

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.

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.

Could I get a friggin' Hot Pocket around here?

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.

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.

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.

Some people, their whole lives, are just injustice collectors. They're going to find new injustices every day. That's what they do, and that's what they are.

Sometimes the wheel turns slowly, but it turns.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Yeah, I love Los Angeles.

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.

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.

All babies are ugly unless they're your baby.

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

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.

Sometimes the wheel turns slowly, but it turns.