“I wake up around seven, and I give my daughter breakfast. I spend the first hour or two of her day with her.”
― Kay Cannon
“We’re big ‘Game of Thrones’ fans, so we call our house King’s Landing. I have a studio apartment above our garage that we call Winterfell. I go to Winterfell to write.”
― Kay Cannon
“On ’30 Rock,’ the hours were really intense, and I was often on set. I’m glad I didn’t have a kid then because I don’t think I would have ever seen her. I would work 15-hour days, and weekends, too.”
― Kay Cannon
“When I was in college, I started an improv group, and I did a bunch of plays and some musicals. I have a theater degree. I’m a school person: I like getting homework and having deadlines. When I graduated, I worked right away as an actor.”
― Kay Cannon
“I was a writer on ’30 Rock’ for six years.”
― Kay Cannon
“When I was younger, I wanted my hair to look like Molly Ringwald’s.”
― Kay Cannon
“I played volleyball and basketball, and I did track and volleyball in college.”
― Kay Cannon
“I was in relays for track where you just bonded with all these different kinds of personalities who were coming together for this one common goal of beating a rival team.”
― Kay Cannon
“I was an athlete, so I have kind of an athletic sensibility towards writing. I can work for many long hours without fatiguing.”
― Kay Cannon
“No one ever actually said they were resistant because ‘Pitch Perfect’ was female-centric. When a project is sitting there for a while, you start to speculate about what could be the thing that might be a little tricky about it.”
― Kay Cannon
“’Pitch Perfect’ was my first screenplay, so it was like my little baby.”
― Kay Cannon
“Ultimately, I want to direct a movie, so that’s another thing, too, where I wonder what that will look like and how will I be able to manage.”
― Kay Cannon
“I was auditioning a lot in L.A., and I was actually getting called back a lot for sitcoms. But I wasn’t getting jobs. I even tested for ‘Saturday Night Live’ and didn’t get that.”
― Kay Cannon
“I was like, ‘I have to start writing for myself, to show people what I can do and what my point of view is.’”
― Kay Cannon
“I was working at ‘New Girl’ when I found out there was going to be a ‘Pitch’ sequel.”
― Kay Cannon
“I would be writing while I was breastfeeding. I didn’t want the computer to be too close to her, so it was at an arm’s distance away while I was clickety-clack typing away.”
― Kay Cannon
“I ran track in college. And that team, that all-lady team that I was on, I can remember just being so incredibly sad that I knew we were all going to leave each other after we graduated and that our lives would change. And even though I was the bridesmaid at all their weddings and stuff like that, it’s just not the same, right?”
― Kay Cannon
“You never imagine that the Green Bay Packers were going to be in something you wrote or singing ‘Bootylicious.’”
― Kay Cannon
“You just tell a good story where you’re funny and it makes people laugh.”
― Kay Cannon
“I’m actually from a small town about an hour and a half south of Chicago.”
― Kay Cannon
“I have to say, my husband is a big Patriots fan. Like, a huge Patriots fan.”
― Kay Cannon
“’Hot Pursuit,’ ‘Pitch Perfect 2,’ ‘Trainwreck,’ and ‘Spy’ were all being done in the last year. All four of those movies I just mentioned are not rom-coms: they’re all about women doing different things.”
― Kay Cannon
“I started writing because I wasn’t getting things as an actor.”
― Kay Cannon
“I wasn’t, like, pretty enough to be the ingenue; I wasn’t ‘character’ enough to be the goofball sidekick. I’m kind of ethnically ambiguous.”
― Kay Cannon
“I’ve got to literally write my own ticket.”
― Kay Cannon
“I took a class at The Second City, and it became contagious.”
― Kay Cannon
“I saturated myself with the improv community.”
― Kay Cannon
“I love that feeling, that feeling of team.”
― Kay Cannon
“It’s interesting: when you’re kind of ‘known’ for being a writer, people don’t think you’ve done anything else.”
― Kay Cannon
“I started writing for myself because I know how to write for myself. I know how to show what I can do.”
― Kay Cannon
“I didn’t set out to write some female-empowering movie; I just wanted to write a funny college comedy.”
― Kay Cannon
“When I finished grad school, I moved to Chicago proper, and I was at all the different improv schools, taking classes or interning.”
― Kay Cannon
“I was crazy poor, but I was learning and putting myself out there and getting hired to do whatever gig I could and auditioning.”
― Kay Cannon
“Second City Las Vegas is very different from Second City in Chicago on the main stage, where they do improv sets. That’s how they kind of hone material, kind of work up to new material.”
― Kay Cannon
“I loved all the people involved with ’30 Rock.’”
― Kay Cannon
“I started writing when I was trying to be an actor, and I happened to be friends with Tina Fey, who happened to have her show ’30 Rock’ coming out. So Tina, who happens to be a mentor to me, gave me my slot and hired me.”
― Kay Cannon
“I feel like the guilds are, just to be frank, people I pay money to.”
― Kay Cannon
“’Bridesmaids,’ I think, opened up a door to allow women to show a bunch of different women in different ways of being funny. It was kind of like an arrival moment.”
― Kay Cannon
“Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, they made it cool to be funny and to be embarrassed and to look a thousand different ways and show a bunch of different areas of their lives.”
― Kay Cannon
“There’s still only maybe three female writers or two female writers to 10 guys in any kind of writer’s room.”
― Kay Cannon
“I like it when adult straight men are big fans of ‘Pitch Perfect!’”
― Kay Cannon
“We have a lot of depressed people in the world because they don’t know what their purpose is in life.”
― Kay Cannon
“People try to make women a very specific thing so that we like them.”
― Kay Cannon
“Society has this deeply rooted love of seeing women fail.”
― Kay Cannon
“Even if I wrote ‘The Kay Cannon Show,’ I would have to audition to play Kay Cannon. And I probably wouldn’t get it.”
― Kay Cannon
“I was the runt of the family, the shortest and the smallest, so I think they perceived me as the one who was like, ‘Look at me!’ – just trying to get their attention and being a goofball.”
― Kay Cannon
“Everything that makes us who we are is A-O.K.”
― Kay Cannon
“On the set of ‘Girlboss,’ I had to keep introducing myself as the show runner – literally, ‘Hi, I’m the boss’ – to a lot of my crew. My first AD said, ‘Why do you keep doing that?’ I said, ‘Because I get mistaken for an extra.’”
― Kay Cannon
“It’s not about having luck; it’s about putting yourself in a position of luck.”
― Kay Cannon
“Tina Fey is my mentor, whether she likes it or not.”
― Kay Cannon
“Tell your daughters and their daughters that if they want to be a firewoman, they can be a firewoman. If they want to be an astronaut, they can be an astronaut. If they want to run their own business or run for president, they can do whatever they put their mind to.”
― Kay Cannon
“I felt that a cappella was the improv world with music, where it’s very serious, and there are groups and competition, and some people become famous, and there’s a language we speak from one improviser to another.”
― Kay Cannon
“I’ve seen ‘Bring It On,’ like, a thousand times.”
― Kay Cannon
“I’m a huge fan of Ace of Base. ‘The Sign?’ I love that song.”
― Kay Cannon
“Writers who sit down and write might judge what they’re putting down, but I always just try to barf it out. I’m writing crap, but I’ll put it down.”
― Kay Cannon
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