Whitney Cummings

For me, my body image struggle started very young. All that I heard from my mother, my aunts, and my mom's friends was, 'I gotta lose five pounds.' At 5 years old, I learned a size 2 is not thin enough. It was, 'Don't eat carbs! Don't eat sugar! Drink Diet Coke! You always diet!' So that was engrained in my brain at a very early age.

I am excited to show people how, when you get older, you get deeper, you get more raw, you get more honest, and you stop pretending to be the person you think people want you to be. I stopped worrying about what people wanted me to say and just sort of dug deep into my personal arsenal of my mistakes and shameful thoughts.

In the entertainment industry, there is this fear of getting older, because we have high definition television now, and you can see things that the human eye can't even pick up. But the good thing about standup is that the older you get, the funnier you get.

My body is not supportive of my career. My body has other plans for me. My body's plan is to slowly rot from the inside. By the time I'm ready to have kids, it's not going to be viable to do that.

Comedians are obsessed with justice and the truth.

When a lot of people are distrusting the news they watch, comedians are stepping up talking about things that most people are too afraid to talk about, shining light on problems nobody else will admit, whether it's Samantha Bee or John Oliver or Trevor Noah.

Being on the plane is my catch-up time. I write thank-you notes. I read. I write stand-up jokes.

I have a theory, which is that the idea of a roast is to go to this forbidden, uncomfortable, almost performance-art-level shock place, but because we're so regularly shocked and offended today, the idea of an hour and a half of unbridled negativity is just so unappealing.

The indie movie world is like a bad Tinder date, and there are always strings attached.

Stand-up. It's the only place I'm comfortable.

We're socially constructed to hide our flaws, and that breeds pain for a lot of people.

I wrote a 'Lenny Letter' on a whim, and it felt indulgent, but people came up to me with tears in their eyes saying, 'Thank you.' There's so much shame about mental illness in our country and so many stereotypes about women being 'crazy' or 'psycho.'

I feel really trapped as a comedian - someone who is supposed to be funny and light, making jokes all the time. But I'm actually in this inauthentic armor.

In my business, you have so many things going at once - TV shows, projects, movies - and sometimes, things never actually come to fruition.

I've been making fun of Donald Trump - we all have - for 10 years, and just bringing up his name... I mean, even if you're supportive of Donald Trump, there's still a lot to make fun of.

Being known doesn't get you anywhere; it just makes the bar and the expectations higher, especially if the venue wants to charge a certain ticket price because you're known. So people are like, 'I paid $60 to see you, and you're on TV'.

The most dangerous place I've ever performed standup is in my home state of California.

I'd love to be Katherine Heigl's best friend in a movie!

I had a moment where I was onstage once... As a comedian, you just think, 'Be funny as possible all the time - like, funny at all costs - jokes, jokes, jokes.' That's how my mentality was.

I wasn't one of those kids who stole Richard Pryor records. I wasn't a comedy-nerd kid. I had no concept of stand-up. Actually, the only inkling of stand-up I had was I read one of Paul Reiser's books when I was, like, 12. I found it at a yard sale, and I carried it around with me for six years.