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.

I was very down as a teenager, very upset because I had gotten hurt in a car accident. But my dad was a source of strength. He used to say, 'It's the character with strength that God gives the most challenges to.' I've thought about that so many times in my life when things didn't go right.

New York has an amazing history of farming and fishing that goes right back to the Pilgrim Fathers. At its core are the four seasons, which are distinct, well-established and similar to those in Lyon, where my family lives: when it's snowing in New York, a week later it will be snowing there.

I normally fly under the radar, and I'm normally not the best in my family, even though I'm sort of second or third best in the world.

I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children - I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife.

We're living in a society where you need to be accountable for your actions, for your behavior - for yourself. To sit back and be reactive would be to allow your children to make big mistakes without the benefit of your wisdom being bestowed on them. It's not what my parents taught me.