Top 350 Amy Poehler Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “According to Washington insiders, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan could be the next official to leave the Bush administration. McClellan says he’d like to spend more time lying for his family.”

— Amy Poehler

202. “If you’re a good improviser, you improvise well enough that people think that you’re doing a sketch.”

— Amy Poehler

203. “It’s interesting that people always want to ask me and a lot of working mothers, how do you do it? And it’s like well, just like everybody else. It proves it’s a bad question.”

— Amy Poehler

204. “When you’re betrayed there’s a period of shame and then there’s always forgiveness.”

— Amy Poehler

205. “I worked at an ice cream parlor called Chadwicks. We wore old-timey outfits and had to bang a drum, play a kazoo, and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to people while giving them free birthday sundaes. Lots of ice cream scooping and $1 tips.”

— Amy Poehler

206. “My idea of the perfect exercise class is this: The teacher gives us all a hug and goes, ‘You did it! You showed up! Let’s lie down.’ We all lie down and she’s like, ‘How is everybody feeling?’ We’re like, ‘Great!’ And the teacher’s like, ‘Great!’ Then we all get to leave 20 minutes early.”

— Amy Poehler

207. “I was the daughter of teachers, so school was always very important. I liked it.”

— Amy Poehler

208. “If it’s not funny, you don’t have to laugh.”

— Amy Poehler

209. “I would love to do a serious period drama. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you’ll find most comedians want to do more serious stuff, most musicians want to be comedians, and most serious actors want to be musicians.”

— Amy Poehler

210. “The desire to work with Burrows-Charles was really to change NBC’s identity, to say, “We want to be in the sophisticated-adult-comedy business.””

— Amy Poehler

211. “Prince Harry this week toured the Jersey Shore with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. It was the first meeting between the Prince, of the House of Windsor, and the Governor, of the House of Pancake.”

— Amy Poehler

212. “I wrote it ugly and in pieces.”

— Amy Poehler

213. “I grew up watching skating all the time in the Olympic stuff.”

— Amy Poehler

214. “In the trial of Saddam Hussein on Tuesday, witnesses emotionally testified about the abuse the former dictator inflicted on them. Afterward, a tearful Saddam said, ‘Ah, good times.’”

— Amy Poehler

215. “If you are lucky, there is a moment in your life when you have some say as to what your currency is going to be. I decided early on it was not going to be my looks.”

— Amy Poehler

216. “If you do a scene and you really like a character in it or a premise in it to write it down and to work on it so that you can have five or six characters that you can pull out in an audition.”

— Amy Poehler

217. “I’d say any good set or any comedy that I’ve worked on, that’s worked, has been comedians pitching ideas back and forth to each other. A lot of like, ‘What if you say this? What about this?’”

— Amy Poehler

218. “I also love being able to do something that kids and families can enjoy because I have two children of my own and I want them to grow up watching all the fabulous animated movies and cartoons that I loved to watch as a kid.”

— Amy Poehler

219. “A top McCain policy adviser claimed this week that McCain’s work in the Senate helped create the BlackBerry, saying, ‘You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.’ He then handed the BlackBerry to McCain, who attempted to withdraw $20 from it.”

— Amy Poehler

220. “President Bush threw out the first pitch Monday at Cincinnati’s great American ball park. 18 Iraqis were killed.”

— Amy Poehler

221. “But as my dear friend and relationship sponsor Louis CK has noted, “divorce is always good news because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.”

— Amy Poehler

222. “Adventure and danger can be good for your heart and soul.”

— Amy Poehler

223. “We may all host ourselves to death, and if we’re all dead who will host our funerals?”

— Amy Poehler

224. “Tall women are attracted to my littleness. I have a lot of tall female friends. They like how I am always looking up to them and I like having the option to jump into their pocket if I want to hide.”

— Amy Poehler

225. “During a recent trip to Amsterdam, she sent me a picture of her smoking marijuana for the first time just because I asked her to.”

— Amy Poehler

226. “I don’t like crowds because I am small and fear being trampled. My ideal night out is a dinner party in my backyard with a group of like-minded friends whom I boss around in a gentle and loving way.”

— Amy Poehler

227. “People work around you and next to you and the universe waits for the perfect time to whisper in your ear, “Look this way.” There is someone in your life right now who may end up being your enemy, your wife, or your boss. Lift up your head and you may notice.”

— Amy Poehler

228. “Jon Bon Jovi went into his own archives and got out the actual outfit he had worn twenty years before during the Slippery When Wet Tour. It still fit. Jon Bon keeps it tight.”

— Amy Poehler

229. “We were also performing. We’d give them a list of, like, ‘Here’s how we want to be introduced’ They’d be like, ‘Great’ And then 5 minutes later they’d come back, ‘Bad news: we lost your list. But good news: we’ve got a trash bag full of weed!’”

— Amy Poehler

230. “Anger and embarrassment are often neighbors. Sometimes we get defensive about what we feel guilty about.”

— Amy Poehler

231. “Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again.”

— Amy Poehler

232. “Gone are the days when you took Henry James on the train and read it in front of cute guys to impress them.”

— Amy Poehler

233. “I am interested in people who swim in the deep end. I want to have conversations about real things with people who have experienced real things.”

— Amy Poehler

234. “Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again. Or you will lose your mind and turn into a crazy person. Either way, let’s just hope you avoided tattoos, because most are pretty stupid anyway.”

— Amy Poehler

235. “I am a tea girl. Coffee smells so good but my stomach doesn’t like it.”

— Amy Poehler

236. “Your ability to navigate and tolerate change and its painful uncomfortableness directly correlates to your happiness and general well-being.”

— Amy Poehler

237. “A word about apologizing: It’s hard to do it without digging yourself in deeper. It’s also scary and that’s why we avoid the pain. We want so badly to plead our case and tell our story. The bad news is that everybody has a story. Everyone has a version of how things went down and how they participated.”

— Amy Poehler

238. “PUDDING IS DELICIOUS.”

— Amy Poehler

239. “Adventure and danger can be good for your heart and soul. Violence and desperation are brutal things to search out. Why search out the horror? It’s around us in real ways every day. I’m talking to you, the people who make that movie “The Human Centipede”. No more “Human Centipede” movies please. No more movies about people’s mouths being sewn onto other people’s butts. The whole idea of making and watching a movie like that makes me want to take a ten-year nap.”

— Amy Poehler

240. “I don’t miss the frustration of youth, the anticipation of love and pain, the paralysis of choices still ahead. The pressure of “What are you going to do?” makes everybody feel like they haven’t done anything yet.”

— Amy Poehler

241. “The accent is a really hard thing for me. It reminds me of my family and my childhood, but it’s one of the worst-sounding accents out there. I love Boston, but we sound like idiots.”

— Amy Poehler

242. “Writing can be thankless. People treat writing like it’s some elegant act but it’s usually lonely and isolating. You will struggle over a piece of writing and then get to set and some dumb actor will say it wrong or immediately want to change it.”

— Amy Poehler

243. “Every mother needs a wife.”

— Amy Poehler

244. “You could just watch your belly grow bigger and no one would be allowed to ask you about it and you would have your baby and a year later you would allow visitors to finally come and meet your little miracle.”

— Amy Poehler

245. “Some people give their demon so much room that there is no space in their head or bed for love.”

— Amy Poehler

246. “Imagine spreading everything you care about on a blanket and then tossing the whole thing up in the air. The process of divorce is about loading that blanket, throwing it up, watching it all spin, and worrying what stuff will break when it lands.”

— Amy Poehler

247. “I had already made a decision early on that I would be a plain girl with lots of personality, and accepting it made everything a lot easier. If you are lucky, there is a moment in your life when you have some say as to what your currency is going to be.”

— Amy Poehler

248. “My generation was obsessed with scoliosis. Judy Blume dedicated an entire novel to it. At least once a month we would line up in the gym, lift our shirts, and bend over, while some creepy old doctor ran his finger up and down our spines. Nuclear war was a high-concept threat, two words that often rang out in political speeches or on the six o-clock news. Our spines. Lice. Nuclear war. The Big Three.”

— Amy Poehler

249. “I will say it again. Ambivalence is key. You have to care about your work but not about the result. You have to care about how good you are and how good you feel, but not about how good people think you are or how good people think you look.”

— Amy Poehler

250. “Pretending to not want something can work. Really not caring if you get it takes a lifetime of practice.”

— Amy Poehler