Lorne Michaels

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.

All saints are selfish.

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.

Yeah, I love Los Angeles.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.