64 Quotes by Lorne Michaels

I think Samantha Bee is doing a really good show.

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

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

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.

Tearing up a picture of the Pope comes under the heading of a Comedy Killer. It kind of breaks the spirit of the evening.

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.

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

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.

We make fun of our leaders.