It's easier to cast yourself in something you've written because you know your voice.
— Nicole Byer
My mom was like, 'You talk so much. You have too much energy. Why don't you just join the play or something?' It was a comedy, and I got laughs in rehearsal, but onstage, in front of a whole audience, I got a lot of laughs.
During my 20s, I truly said 'yes' to everything, whether it was a good idea or not.
Let's just let funny people be funny.
You don't need someone to complete you.
I'm not sassy all day every day. I have levels and feelings.
I've always been a mediocre student, so I never won an award in school. I'm not very athletic, so I've never won a sports award. So, I'm a mediocre person.
The way I toe the line with comedy is I run jokes past people.
I had a casting director tell me to be blacker.
If someone is going to say something nasty to me about my body, that means my body is powerful. If you really stopped your day because you needed to say something to me, that's power.
In school, no one teaches you to look for things that are right for you.
L.A. may be easy for the beautiful because it's the land of the beautiful.
I've lived an interesting life.
Commercial auditions can be pretty humiliating.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again because you can't say it enough: Your skin is beautiful - dark, light, in the middle, whatever. Brown is beautiful. Your hair is beautiful. If you wear a weave, it's beautiful. If you choose to be natural, that's beautiful. Also, you are enough.
I was in a Rite Aid... and fell into a Christmas tree display. None other than Shia LaBeouf helped me out of it.
What I needed to do was carve out parts for me, roles for me that weren't just the sidekick, where I got to be the lead, because that's breaking through.
It's not a weakness to admit that you're wrong.
Be comfortable in your skin.
I just woke up one day was like, 'People know you're fat whether you have a cardigan on or your arms are out, so why not just let your arms be out because you're hot.'
Talking-head shows are just a camera, a sound guy, and then a PA writing down what you say and a producer asking you questions. And you're just supposed to rephrase the question and add a joke to it. Figuring out how to do that was super hard.
Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would look people in the face and be like, 'Your snake cake's not good.'
I hate that there's such an emphasis on women in comedy. Are women OK? Are they just as funny as men? Yes!
I get it - there are very few black female actresses who have been given chances.
I think I saw 'Ghost' at, like, 6 or 7 - like, a little too early to see 'Ghost' - but I would watch Whoopi over any kids' thing. Everything she did was so funny, and all of her scenes are almost like sketches.
Dogs are very strange, but they're wonderful and they love to cuddle, and their breath is so stinky!
I am an archetype. There's the fat, sassy, black friend, you know? That's an archetype that exists, but that's not truly me.
If someone goes, 'Can you be sassier?' I go, 'I can be my kind of sassier. I'm not gonna put a voice on. The voice I have is my voice.'
If you want to change your body, that's well within your means to do that, but if you don't want to change your body, you need to accept it and embrace it.
