When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.

“I represent happiness to a lot of people. I want to keep myself as open and as nonjudgmental as possible. Before the show was picked up, I think a lot of station managers thought I would have an agenda to try to somehow turn the world gay. People did worry. Our only agenda is to make people feel good. It’s an hour of joy.”

On her wife, Portia: “We’re together all the time. We genuinely love each other. Her happiness is my happiness, and vice versa. True love is caring more about the other person’s happiness than your own.”

“I’m sensitive. I like to be around kind, gentle people. It would be really hard for me to be around somebody who is harsh or sarcastic all the time.”

“I love being able to do a monologue every day, make people laugh, give them things, and then go home [knowing] I’ve done something creative.”

“The world is filled with negativity. ‘I want people to watch me and think, ‘I feel good, and I’m going to make somebody else feel good today.’”

“I don’t like to make fun of people. It’s a form of bullying. I’ve been the butt of jokes before—a punch line—and that just gave me more fuel to say I will never do it.”

“I love stories that are inspirational yet have a lot of heartache, because I think that’s what life is,” she says. “Life is filled with struggles and yet there’s always beauty.”

“Dory is just innocent, very childlike, and that’s fun to play. And I can relate to the short-term memory [loss]. I ­really do say, ‘Nice to meet you,’ at the same time people are saying, ‘Nice to see you again.’ ”