Second City Quotes

#1. I never looked at my future as comedy. Even at Second City, I always thought of it as acting. I knew I was going to be an actor financially, emotionally, egotistically.

Scott Adsit

#2. I did Second City, and Nia Vardalos also did Second City, so I knew her from there.

Rachel Dratch

#3. I had not met Tina Fey before I auditioned for '30 Rock'. Some people think we're old friends from 'Second City' days. I had always been a fan of Tina's. But I actually never planned on being in a sitcom.

Judah Friedlander

#4. Well, actually, the Second City thing came about because I was taking a few improv classes there. I thought that the improv classes would help with my wrestling career, which it has.

Trish Stratus

#5. After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that's where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.

Tina Fey

#6. Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.

Darin Strauss

#7. In a one-woman show, there must be compelling material that you adore. In both of these there are conversations with you and another character. My Second City (improvisation) background comes in very handy for accent and body posture.

Valerie Harper

#8. I took one class at Second City called Improv for Actors, and that was it, and that was only because my agent told me I had to.

Timothy Simons

#9. I'm a huge fan of John Hughes and can say that 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles' is easily a top 3 favorite. I'm also a huge fan of all the Second City talent, and I think my Dad and Bill Murray are long lost twins.

Ryan McPartlin

#10. There's such a freewheeling nature to 'Second City,' and the greatest thing about 'Second City' was having a sophisticated audience night after night who appreciated what it was. They knew it wasn't all going to be great when you improvised, so they were very forgiving that way.

Steve Carell

#11. Out of 30 years of Second City I was probably the third African-American with the main stage cast. I was surprised when I first heard that. I think part of the reason that improvisation has never been popular with African-Americans is that it isn't popular in the inner cities.

Tim Meadows

#12. I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

Dan Castellaneta

#13. I moved to Chicago when I was 28, and I wasn't completely idealistic about going to Second City and making a living from comedy, but I knew it would be great for the resume.

Allison Tolman

#14. The alumni of Second City from John Belushi to Martin Short have changed my entire life and brought a new kind of comedy to America and the World.

Bernie Brillstein

#15. I met Kevin when I was 19, at a Second City workshop. We were paired up together in the first class I went to. By the end of the class we formed our improv group, and over the next three years we performed leading up to the formation of The Kids in the Hall.

Dave Foley

#16. My stepfather had a connection with The Second City and told me I should go there. I woke up in a cold sweat one night and said, 'I'm moving to Chicago.' That's how I went to Second City.

Ian Gomez

#17. There are a lot of actors that are more talented than me at Second City who quit it before they even got to a paying status. Weird luck. I had no other option.

Bill Murray

#18. However, of all the places I've worked that were supposedly boys' clubs, The Second City was the only one where I experienced institutionalized gender nonsense.

Tina Fey

#19. I grew up on Don Knotts and Jerry Lewis and all the guys from Second City.

Harland Williams

#20. I was at Second City L.A., going through the conservatory, and I graduated in 2004 and I got 'SNL' in 2005.

Bill Hader

#21. The first time I went to see a Second City show, I was in awe of everything. I just wanted to touch the same stage that Gilda Radner had walked on. It was sacred ground.

Tina Fey

#22. I took Second City out of desperation, and that's what ended up working out. It shows that you should be doing a lot of different stuff, taking whatever opportunities are there, to see what works.

Bill Hader

#23. I went to Second City, where you learned to make the other actor look good so you looked good and National Lampoon, where you had to create everything out of nothing, and SNL, where you couldn't make any mistakes, and you learned what collaboration was.

Bill Murray

#24. Tina Fey is part of a generation of women who have changed the face of comedy at 'Second City,' 'SNL,' in sitcoms and in film.

Janeane Garofalo

#25. We come from Second City where you're taught if you make your fellow stage partner look good, that makes you look good.

Ian Gomez

#26. I joined an improv group in college, which was a lot of fun. After I graduated, I moved to Chicago to try to get into the Second City.

Steve Carell

#27. I graduated from Second City Los Angeles. It helped me tremendously, not only in my roles in films but in helping shape me into a writer as well. In improv, you will fail sometimes, so it teaches you to be brave and try anything. The worst that can happen is nobody laughs.

Carly Craig

#28. I met my wife, Nia Vardalos, at The Second City, and she was chomping at the bit to move to L.A.

Ian Gomez

#29. I did a lot of commercial and theater work when I got out of school and was living in Dallas, and I moved to Chicago to go through the Second City Conservatory Program.

Allison Tolman

#30. I had, like, two goals in my career: One was to try to get into 'Second City.' When I moved to Chicago, my goal was to try to work at 'Second City.' And beyond that, my goal was to make enough money as an actor to not do anything else but act, not have to go and wait tables again.

Steve Carell

#31. I'm a bug on acting, which distinguishes Second City from a lot of other revues. It comes from the character, the behavior, and not from the jokes. I don't think jokes are funny. Humor comes out of character and out of situations the character is in.

Bernard Sahlins

#32. Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam. And Italy is an outpost of that province, a stronghold of that colony ... In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Quran. A stage in the Islamic expansionism.

Oriana Fallaci

#33. When I graduated from college, I moved to New York and started doing improv because I read all about the early 'Saturday Night Live' guys having come through Second City and learning how to improvise, so I wanted to get immediately into that.

Andy Daly

#34. I came out of the old Second City in Chicago. Chicago actors are more hard-nosed. They're tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They're self-demanding.

Bill Murray

#35. That was sort of the 'Second City' approach, which was try to be intelligent and assume your audience is intelligent. We were influenced by 'Monty Python,' too, which would have philosophers in a wrestling match.

Joe Flaherty

#36. I had spent years working in radio at different stations in Toronto; I wasn't in the stage company of Second City.

Rick Moranis

#37. That night's show was watched by ten million people, so I guess that director at The Second City who said the audience "didn't want to see a sketch with two women" can go shit in his hat.

Tina Fey

#38. I learned more at The Second City than I did at Yale for all that high tuition.

Robert Klein

#39. To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicago's second city of garages was my young life's passion.

Lynn Margulis

#40. I got a degree in broadcast journalism at Northwestern but was running a sketch-comedy group and then went to Second City. When the writers' strike happened in 2007-2008, I went to work at E! because I had that background.

Robin Thede

#41. I think a lot of studios today are run by women, and we are entering a time when a lot of women have evolved in Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade and wanted to become writers and comedians.

Judd Apatow

#42. An avalanche descends onto the city. A hurricane. Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another quarter second, the sirens are inaudible. Everything is inaudible. The roar becomes loud enough to separate membranes in the middle ear.

Anthony Doerr

#43. I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.

John Green

#44. I would burn down the world for you," he whispered fiercely. "Your world or my own. I would rip down the entire city with my bare hands without a second thought. I don't need to taste anything else, I don't need a comparison.

Delilah S. Dawson

#45. It is not about the money. It's the public service aspect. Absolutely, I think it has qualities of redemption. The city gets a second chance. I get a second chance.

John Rowland

#46. Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

Mohsin Hamid

#47. Supporting the English cricket team is like supporting a second division football team. I support Norwich City football team and when they lose I really don't mind because I expect them to; but when we win I'm so happy - much happier than any Arsenal supporter could ever be.

Stephen Fry

#48. It was early spring, 326 BC, in the beautiful city of Chersonesus protected by a haunting deep blue sea and a giant wall. Today was the second day of the Festival of Dionysus.

Destin Bays

#49. There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster's guide to Alexandria; the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms; grin like a dog and run about through the city.

Jan Morris

#50. A report by ArchCity Defenders, a non-profit group, found that the municipal court in Ferguson - a city of 21,135 people - issued 32,975 arrest warrants last year, mostly for traffic violations. These fines and fees were the second-biggest source of the city's $20m income.

Anonymous

#51. The decision to move to the second post-college city (or suburb, or town), however, is usually made independent of friends. No matter if you do it for love, career, family, or school, the second move is on your own terms.

Rachel Bertsche

#52. The second assault on Fallujah was a monument to brutality and atrocity made in the United States of America. Like the Spanish city of Guernica during the 1930s, and Grozny in the 1990s Fallujah is our monument of excess and overkill.

Dahr Jamail

#53. Had Brussels's rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble.

Teju Cole

#54. During my second draft pass on my last book I made 20,000 words happen in a week, which is practically supernatural for me, and it would never have been possible without three nights in a hotel in my own city.

Laini Taylor

#55. Crime reporting was aggressive in Richmond, an old Virginia city of 220,000, which last year was listed by the FBI as having the second-highest homicide rate

Patricia Cornwell

#56. In November 2004, U.S. occupation forces launched their second major attack on the city of Falluja. The press reported major war crimes instantly, with approval.

Noam Chomsky

#57. The railway was part scalpel, part movie camera, slicing the city open, parading its inner workings at fifty frames per second. It was on the S-Bahn that she felt least abandoned, as if the act of travelling turned back the clock, and brought her nearer to the future she had lost.

Philip Sington

#58. In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

Mark Twain

#59. I live in Los Angeles, which is the second most polluted city in the world, and I wake up in the morning to dirt all over my window.

Ryan Tedder

#60. I gaze up at the ceiling. Through it. Past Kim and Chip's room on the second floor into the sky, space, heaven, hell. Who says hell is down? It could be up. It could be next door to heaven. Hell could be a subset of heaven, like a ghetto in the middle of a glass city.

Julie Anne Peters

#61. After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: no I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one.

Miranda July

#62. I feel like I'm adapting to society. I went feral a little bit. I found that when I would get back to the city, if there was any second-guessing about stuff, it would happen.

Luke Temple

#63. We can talk about Manchester! I like coming here, it's a wicked city. It's my second favourite city in England after London. I like Liverpool too but there's a lot more to do in Manchester.

Dave Mason

#64. My mind wanders and I drift off into La-La Land. I dream about Thalassic City. About opportunity. And second chances. About actually living.

Siobhan Davis

#65. That has to come to an end and end now. No citizen is a second-class citizen in the city of Chicago. If my children are treated one way, every child is treated the same way.

Chris Hayes

#66. When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel.

Elizabeth McCracken

#67. I loved doing Cee Lo's Bright Lights in the Big City. That was definitely a favorite of mine, because I love to get all soulful. And a close second would be Flo Rida's Right Round, because I could rap, which I've never really done before.

Skylar Astin

#68. The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#69. we may always find a great and a beautiful city in the world for ourselves but the most precious and finest city to live in is our mind; a positive mind and a per second positive thoughts

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#70. Actually, Sydney is my second favourite city on earth, I love Sydney, but this is the greatest.

Jeffrey Archer

#71. As I settled down to sleep in that new bed in the dark city, I saw that it was too late now, too late for everything. I would not be given a second chance. In the hours when I woke, I have to tell you that this struck me almost with relief.

Colm Toibin

#72. Wait a second," Clary said.
"I never understand why people say that," Luke said, to no one in particular. "I wasn't going anywhere.

Cassandra Clare

#73. Maybe I'll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C. That

Kathleen Rooney

#74. That was such an important time for us, as a team. It was our second gold medal in a row, following Salt Lake City, and really established ourselves as the best team in the world.

Hayley Wickenheiser

#75. Every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles and hour.

Sylvia Plath

#76. Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

Don DeLillo

#77. Now, though, there was a second part, an artifact of his recent illness, as if his melancholy had, in a universe adjacent to this one, claimed his life. As if he was his own ghost, standing slightly behind himself, observing.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#78. There are two ways to find a lost city. The first is to rely on luck alone, the second is to control all the information.

Tahir Shah

#79. It is perfectly banal to establish a city in the middle of nature but it is perfectly extraordinary to establish nature in the middle of a city! Ordinary nations do the first, extraordinary nations do the second!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#80. Born in 1936, I experienced the Second World War as a child in the city of Gelsenkirchen-Buer. This area was heavily bombed, but fortunately, all members of my family survived the war and post-war period.

Harald Zur Hausen

#81. Stuffing one muffin in his mouth and a second in his pocket, Auguste slipped into a side passage and away. He'd just take a wander 'round the city and hope some assassin made a merciful move.

Rachel Heffington

#82. I live and die with the Indians. The first game I attended back in the mid-'90s was almost a religious experience. We were down by six and won by two, and it was glorious. The stadium is so beautiful, and the way it frames the city when you're sitting high above the second base line is spectacular.

Mary Doria Russell