I have a great job writing for 'The Office ' but really all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is like Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

In my family in the days prior to television we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.

It's not common for a woman on television especially if she's the mom of the family to be funny. She's usually a straight man or foil.

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers and I grew up in a very funny conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena Queen of the Jungle.'

There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure there was no such thing as just getting over it.

You must not demand the failure of your peers because the more good things that are around in film in television in theater - why the better it is for all of us.

I think we're the only jokeless show on television. I mean really we have no setups and no punch lines. It's not a joke show. There are funny lines and funny moments but again the comedy is born of the human experience and awkward pauses are a great part of what it is to be human.

The printed page conveys information and commitment and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.

There's a positive side to film and television the sense of feeding into the theater... Your fans will follow you hopefully and be open-minded to see you play other things and experience other stories you want to tell.