Lisa Kudrow

Lisa: When I first met my husband, I offered him my phone number and told him to call me for a game of tennis. I wasn't playing games. After our tennis date, I invited him to a party. He showed up, and I was like, 'You're here!' I took his breath away with how I wasn't hiding how happy I was to see him.

Lisa: I decided early on that I don't know anything about movies. I was just learning about TV.

Lisa: I actually made an effort to reject acting, to shove it out of my body, because I didn't want my kids to have an actress as a mother-to have, like, a silly person.

Lisa: Friends' producers have always been really generous about accommodating the schedule, and they don't have to do that. No show ever has to do that, because they own you.

Lisa: For me it was just, No, I'm saving myself. I have to make myself worthy of the kind of man I have in mind.

Lisa: Christina Ricci is amazing, the most professional actor I think I've ever met. You can be chatting with her and when they call action, she's right there.

Lisa: Blonde is dumb comedy, red hair is smart, sexy comedy.

Lisa: Before I became an actress, I used to think, 'When I get famous, there's so much love for you. And I think that's what everyone's after with trying to achieve celebrity.

Lisa: I always felt like I could be funny, but there was a part of me that always judged actors so harshly... I thought all actors were dumb-that they must have serious emotional problems. Even if they don't, that's the perception I had of them. I didn't want anyone to see me that way.

Lisa: I found the right man, got married, and just had to keep not reinventing myself, just deciding that it doesn't matter what you are if you are a good person.

Lisa: I mostly have played dumb characters up until recently, and it's kind of a nice way to be. There's something easy about that kind of life.

Lisa: An actress, around 40, on television, that's where you get the most torture, I think.

Lisa: We treat sex so casually and use it for everything but what it is - which is ultimately making another human being with thoughts and feelings and rights who will grow up to be an adult

Lisa: There are some issues I'm more conservative on. As a parent, I'm concerned that there are so many young, young, young kids - like 12 years old - that are starting to have sex

Lisa: I think, on network TV, I'm still Phoebe to people and it would be hard to convince them otherwise in the bright lights of a sitcom.

Lisa: I started watching reality shows and being horrified at people signing up to be humiliated in front of the entire country. I saw one show, The Amazing Race, in which people were eating spicy soup and vomiting and crying. Why would you do that? Also, I was fascinated by these actors and actresses who would sign up to be followed around by cameras in their life. You become a celebrity, not because of your work or what you do, but because you have no privacy. I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. It's worth more than that. I'm worth more than that.

Lisa: In college I castrated 21 rats, and I got pretty good at it.

Lisa: I've learned you can make a mistake and the whole world doesn't end. I had to learn to allow myself to make a mistake without becoming defensive and unforgiving.

Lisa (on her pre-Emmy-show tradition): I usually have some nervous ritual where I have a shot of something…not an injection of something, but a shot, a drink.