Quotes About Influence

My timing came from Funkadelic, definitely.

Timing is very important in politics.

I was at the Apollo Theater all the time, skipping school, and I worked in a barbershop. That's how I started with doo-wop. Now I've come full circle. I did all kinds of music. I used to work on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.

You don't just have to be influenced by rock, or goth, anymore. It's okay to say, 'My influences are Tin Pan music from Bali and Rihanna.' There are still so many combinations that haven't been done yet.

So many people: Lucille Ball is the earliest incarnation of a woman I thought was funny, Joan Rivers, Roseanne, Carol Burnett, Gilda Radnor, down to current times, where you have Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Kristen Wiig.

I'm more influenced by characters than standups. I love strong, comic women because it's so hard, and I have so much respect for anyone who can do it. I'm a big fan of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and people like that.

I just want Tina Fey to be my best friend. And Lena Dunham. And Oprah, too.

I love 'Mean Girls.' I held out on watching it for a long time, but I'm so glad I finally did. Tina Fey is brilliant.

Tina Fey is one of my heroes.

I think Amy Poehler and Tina Fey have done so much for women in comedy in the sense that they've normalized it. You don't think, 'I'm going to watch that comedy starring a woman,' you think, 'I'm going to watch that funny show.' They refuse to play the foils for men, or be reduced to the butt of every joke, and I love that about both of them.

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

If you want a great replacement, like, who can follow Barack and still have that swag, that charisma, that charm and be historic - I think it would be Tina Fey for president.

For Lennon and me, we grew up with Laverne and Shirley or Lucy and Ethel. For us, those are our inspirations. And I think Amy Poehler and Tina Fey led the way for us to be fearless in the way we kept shoving our message and our comedy voice down people's throats until they listened.

I had done some small-sketch stuff in college, and at that time, Tina Fey was becoming a heavy influence on my life and my world. I decided I wanted to do what she was doing.

And when people in power can stay in power they do very little to tinker with the apparatus that put them in power.

We've been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years - look at a poodle! So we've created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn't be here were it not for us.

I had several friends associated with the tinsel world - like A Veerapan, Bhagyaraj, R Sunder Rajan. Thanks to them, I got a few roles in films.

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world.

Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.

Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.

In England, David and I are big fish in a small pond. But in L.A., we are tiny, tiny, tiny fish in a big pond.

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

Prediction just means you saw where the world might be going: ho-hum. Influence, though - ah. Influence, direct and acknowledged, means you actually steered the world, even if only a tiny bit.

Knowing that girls are inspired to not have the burden of self-hate, even if it's a tiny way, makes me happy to no end. It gets me up in the morning and softens a lot of the blows I get.