In my neighborhood growing up, 8, 10,12 kids were the norm. Those stay-at-home moms would handle so much physically and emotionally. Even in my early teens, I could tell those ladies were something.

Improvisation, if you play it at the top of your intelligence, leads to a kind of truth that people find really accessible.

I live in this apartment building, and everybody who lives there thinks of me as a housewife. People drop their babies off with me. Or I get notes: 'I'm going to be gone for three days. The keys are under the mat; take care of the cats.' Because they all think I'm home all the time.

I thought of Second City as just the greatest therapeutic job anybody could ever dream of having.

Neither of us entered marriage thinking it wouldn't be a strain. Life has strains in it, and he's the person I want to strain with.

I have a very all-over-the-place lifestyle. The people I know who are married - 90 percent of them have houses and live in the same place and sleep in the same bed every night.

The bottom line is, whether you're in it or you're searching for it, I believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting.

There are millions of people who think that romance isn't real writing. But the only person who can make you real, make your books real, is you.