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.

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

I remember, when I was 7, my dad found a pregnant dog on the railroad track one day and brought her home. So my mom explained about how this dog was married but that her husband had passed away - she didn't want me to even think that a dog could have babies without being married.

Oprah was not somebody who was telling us what to do, she wasn't really teaching us like so many people we see today. With Oprah, she was learning and we were learning with her. And I think that's really was the seed that was planted for all of us to just hang in there with her.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

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 don't know if I realized that I was funny, but I realized how healing and important humor was in my childhood.

Humor is very healing.

If you're authentic, people smile because they sense there's a piece of themselves there.